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go-hux-yourself · 5 years ago

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Holdout

Request fill for @thethespacecoyote: Hux trying and failing to keep his pregnancy secret from SL kylo because he thinks he wont want it but when kylo does find out, he's SOFT. YES this is right up my alley let’s do it!

Also on my ao3 here :) My masterlist archive of bullshit i write can be found linked at the top of the blog or here.

He’d thought he could hide it.

A tall order when dealing with a mind-reader, but Hux was certain Kylo would have neither the inclination nor the interest in the rearing of children, so the alpha was left in the dark about the pregnancy.

It would be a while more before the omega’s lithe stature gave away his secret. A while more for Hux to figure out how to hide it from a Supreme Leader that sometimes shared his bed, but had no greater urge in life than that which to hunt down every last faction the Resistance still had left.

Kylo had let it consume him, as if there were something he needed to prove, and his sole focus had kept him from Hux’s bed for weeks now. The First Order had been keeping very busy indeed; little time for attention on personal matters.

Hux hadn’t even noticed his heat was two week’s past, so embroiled in the detailed movements of the Supreme Leader and their various military incursions was he. Intelligence was coming in from various posts in the galaxy, and Kylo left Hux to delegate as he personally searched after leads. It was an exhausting amount of work, and one that prioritized sleep well over any ideas so strenuous as sex.

One exhausted moment of introspection about how he was sure to stress himself right into heat he was so tired, and Hux realized with dread that he was actually overdue for his own.

One panicked visit with a medical droid whose memory he wiped immediately after, and Hux was blankly faced with the fact that he was just over two months pregnant with the Supreme Leader’s pup.

It was far from an ideal situation.

Unbonded. The solidity of his relationship with Ren tumultuous at most. They got along best between the sheets, though professionally they still butted heads a great deal.

It was clear that his priorities and that of the new Supreme Leader went in opposite directions towards the same goal of conquest. They both wanted the old galactic systems of rule to die. Peace from war. Order. Crime punished, and people efficiently managed into a working system of governance.

Ren thought the destruction of the order of the Jedi would secure that end, and meanwhile Hux sent battalions of stormtroopers after Resistance hideouts to strike hard and fast with confirmed intelligence. But Ren was clear that he wanted every lead chased, every whisper checked out, and it spread their resources far too thin, their net cast just a bit wider than Hux would say was effective. Much of the crew had pulled extended shifts in order to deal with the heavier workload and sifting through gathered intel, and Hux was no exception.

His own duties as General kept him far too busy to add an infant to the mix. The idea of sending his own progeny away from him into the First Order nurseries, and subsequently into his Stormtrooper program, would never be an option. He’d never much entertained the idea of having children but already he was fiercely possessive about the pup inside him. His father might not have wanted him, but he desperately wanted his own.

Hux liked kids. They were moldable, adaptable, and the idea of being the father he never had-- to love, to cuddle, to teach his own child to carve out their destiny- plucked at some sore spot inside of him that would do anything to keep it.

When weighing the possible outcomes of telling Kylo, his mind easily imagined the worst scenarios, hard-based on their once-violent professional relationship. Even in the better-case scenarios, he couldn’t imagine a Kylo that would choose fatherhood over being Supreme Leader; to prioritize time for a pup over waging war. And with his hang-ups over family-- ignoring Hux’s own for the moment- his concerns weren’t just over Kylo’s indifference; he was worried the alpha would actively not want it.

Even now with their sometimes-heated arguments, he wasn’t necessarily afraid of the other man. Kylo had promised to never use the force against him in such a manner again, and while Hux did believe him, the cynical, protective part of himself still decided it wasn’t worth risking the not-yet-visible bump on his middle.

He could take being thrown about by the Force-- the terror didn’t do him any physical harm like the hard edges of console once had- but if Ren were to be particularly upset upon Hux’s insistence on keeping it-- in wanting some say in choosing just who would be siring any heirs to his reign- it wouldn’t take much to make the omega miscarry.

So Hux kept quiet, abandoning any ideas of letting the alpha know, and trying to formulate some plan to keep it from the other man’s notice before and after it was born. He had a lot to prepare, and many plans to make.

He didn’t mention it when Ren returned from some trek through an icy moon, warming himself around Hux for the first time in weeks with kisses and touches he’d sorely missed. And when Ren left on some mission again without even bothering to inform him, he felt vindicated in his choice to not inform the alpha in fair play.

Hux began his plan of discouraging their trysts when his belly began to show obvious signs of the pup there, pleading exhaustion to their workload that he followed up with a jab about how surely their Supreme Leader couldn’t spare the time to fuck him when he didn’t even have enough time to inform the fleet when and where he took off to at a whim. It only helped matters that, in terms of security, Hux’s jab was in-line with current Order protocol for high-ranking officers. As Supreme Leader, that made him the rule, rather than the exception.

It played well right into Kylo’s own petty sense of spite, and he’d declared that two could play at this game; if the man thought he could dictate when they’d fuck, then Kylo could wait until Hux became so frustated for his knot that he’d be begging his way back into the alpha’s bed.

That had been about three months prior, and the past three weeks Hux had been growing considerably concerned that his greatcoat could no longer hide the prominent bulge of his pup beneath his modified uniform. Holo-calls instead of in-person meetings, and general avoidance of one-another was the only thing standing between Hux and Kylo finding out his secret. But he knew that the further along the pup got, the more difficult his plan would be.

Thankfully, one could always count on Kylo being far more petty than he. The alpha avoided direct-contact with him (even if he made allusions to innuendo in order to frustrate Hux on their private calls), but by some mercy of the galaxy, Hux’s secret was still unknown by the Supreme Leader.

He knew his scent must be unmistakable now, and he was fairly certain that the inquisitive little looks he saw Mitaka give him were informed of the fact that their commander was pregnant. It was a credit to his crew that they largely pretended otherwise. Hux did the same, continuing in his duties no matter how his feet hurt or his back ached, trying in vain to keep to his usual routine and workload when his body was busy growing a little person.

If Hux’s crew didn’t know he was pregnant before, then when he’d collapsed from exhaustion on the bridge, they certainly did after.

Waking up on his back minutes later with Mitaka and petty officer Thanisson leaned over him was as disorienting as it was embarrassing, and Hux tried to right himself before the worried voice of his lieutenant gave him pause.

“Sir! General, please, we’ve called for a hover-stretcher--” Mitaka’s concerned voice informed, the other omega’s hands palm-up as if to deter him from getting to his feet. It was clear he wanted to touch Hux to keep him down, but also wouldn’t dare to do so without permission.

Thanisson got to his feet, informing those alerted that Hux had regained consciousness. Mitaka kept his place at Hux’s side.

“Hover-stretcher?” Hux repeated, cheeks growing a bit red as it sank in that not for the first time in his career, he was laid out flat on the bridge of his own star ship. His eyes darted around, passing over Thanisson’s face as the beta was speaking to presumed medical officers on comm. Mitaka’s gaze settled on Hux’s belly more than once, and Hux realized the telling-bump in his uniform was clearly visible in the way his greatcoat had fallen open on his figure. The stretch of modified, regulation pregnancy-attire over his belly was informing of its own, but splayed out on the flat of his back, it became wildly apparent that he wasn’t just pregnant, but heavily pregnant. Hux could curse Ren’s imposingly large stature later for what was surely going to be a pup that would take after its sire’s height, but for now, he focused on keeping his breathing even and deep even as his heart rate sped up. This wasn’t knowledge he could easily take back.

It was telling in the way that the other officers on-deck kept their attentions on their stations and not on the general lying prone on the floor. His secret was thoroughly exposed, even if the crew willfully ignored the spectacle as Mitaka personally fussed. He didn’t know if the crew were doing it for his benefit or his dignity, but the shock of their general effectively passing-out on-duty would have been cause for the exact opposite of focus on their jobs. That they weren’t gawking told him plenty.

The thought made Hux flush deeper.

“You collapsed, sir,” Mitaka informed in a gentle, respectful tone. “Until the medical team gets here...” his eyes darted to Hux’s belly in concerned meaning as he trailed off, still not touching the other man but gesturing for him to remain where he was.

Hux realized with gratitude that Mitaka was trying even now to be discreet, but as it was abundantly clear that the entire bridge now knew that someone had bred their general, not mentioning his belly for what it was was a practice in well-meaning futility. “I’m fine, Lieutenant.”

“But sir, your--”

He wanted to snap at the other man for defying him, but it was clear in the way Mitaka’s eyes continued to bounce back to his belly that the other omega was just worried about his pup. Maybe it was hormones, or just stress, but Hux appreciated the concern deeply. He bitterly thought it was nice that someone else cared about the pup, let alone knew of its existence, and also thought that that person should be Kylo.

The alpha was still hell-bent on waging his one-man wars on minor Resistance outposts than sharing Hux’s bed, though.

He reminded himself he’d chosen this, and that he’d have to step up his plans perhaps a bit sooner.

“Nothing feels wrong,” Hux informed as he managed himself to his knees, eyes scanning defensively over the crew as he possessively touched over his belly with both hands. Thanisson politely looked away; Mitaka awaited instructions. “Help me to my feet, Lieutenant.”

Mitaka stood, uncertain about how or where to touch the general, but Hux just extended a gloved hand to the other man, more than capable of still hauling himself around, albeit a bit cumbered. He pulled himself to his feet with Mitaka’s forearm.

“...Sir?”

Hux felt nauseous, a little dizzy, but the adrenaline of that slight humiliation would be plenty to get him back to his quarters and between sheets that had lost Ren’s scent some time ago. He gave the other omega a look before gratefully removing his gloved hand from the man’s arm. “I shall retire to my quarters for the remainder of the shift. You may send a medical droid there. I leave the bridge to you.”

A look passed between Thanisson and Mitaka, but neither pressed the general on an escort. Their concern was palpable, but the last thing Hux wanted was an audience as he effectively retreated from the bridge. He wouldn’t faint twice if he had any say in the matter, and it was with that focus that his feet brought him without incident to his door, and he deposited himself in bed.

The medical unit that entered his quarters gave him a vitamin-drip and beeped out that he was anemic and overworked, but that his pup was okay. Nothing he frankly didn’t already know or suspect. He’d limited his own caf intake significantly since finding out about the pup, and he hadn’t used a stim in ages. The strain of working without stimulants had simply caught up with him.

It didn’t help that even with all his plans in motion, his hormones craved the alpha that had put him in this state; even as he was sure that Kylo wouldn’t be interested in it. Rather traipse across the galaxy in search of sith relics after snuffing out Resistance cells than spend his time chasing after Hux. Far too busy to indulge in a pregnant omega who was supposed to be his second-in-command with his first priority to the fleet.

He wrapped his arms over his belly reassuringly. He didn’t need Kylo. He didn’t want him. He could manage this all on his own. He could prove he could still keep the Order running as he always had, pregnant belly or no.

Hux considered wiping this incident-- and the record of the pregnancy- from his medical file once the droid was done with him, but considered it an act in futility. Too many eyes had seen what he’d been hiding, reinforcing what they must’ve suspected for months now. Whether it got around the ship or not could be deterred with the threat of reconditioning. Kylo never checked medical records anyway, and the pup would be here in a few short months besides.

He complied with the droid’s orders for rest, but his sleep was plagued with dreams of an uncertain future for his pup; a future both with and without Kylo in it.

Hux tossed in his sleep, waking from nightmares only to hunker down into the pillows defiantly. He placed a warm palm over his belly as if to soothe the pup from his own dreams.

It would be okay. It would all be okay.

Second chapter will be found on the ao3 post for this fic :)

kofi | ao3

#kylux fanfic #kylux #omegaverse #armitage hux #kylo ren #omega hux #alpha kylo ren #fanfic #my fic #all tags detailed on the ao3 post :)#mpreg #im still taking kylux and gingerpilot prompts btw :)#trying to get some short stuff done for funsies :D

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toast-the-unknowing · 5 years ago

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Hi there, toast. Cutting to the chase: you're one of my favorite writers — not just one of my favorite fanfic writers. your short stories for the raven cycle are some of the funniest, tightest, emotionally devastating, well-crafted works of fiction i've encountered in awhile — better than a lot """"real-world, published"""" stuff. I kind of want to know more about how you got to this point. I think you've mentioned a background in screenwriting? But I don't think that's your day job? 1/?

2/? Really, I'm asking because you seem to have found a way to write regularly — to develop your chops and publish your art in a way that seems emotionally satisfying for you. to an outsider like myself, you seem to have struck a balance between living a life that pays the bills, and artmaking in a way that feeds your soul. you might not feel that way, i don't know. i'm someone who studied writing in college and am now wondering if and how i can still water that seed....

3/? when the reality is i also need to make money to live. i guess i'm curious about your life model right now, and if you're happy with the way you're currently fulfilling yourself creatively. do you want to be a """""published writer""""" someday? is your job one that is also creatively fulfilling, or is it more to pay the bills so that you can do your own creative projects in your free time?

4/4 I know my question isn't very clear, and I'm not sure it's even one question. the point is, i admire you, and you seem to be in a habit of writing creatively, even though i think you have an unrelated day job, and that balance seems mysterious and desirable to me.

Thank you for your kind words, Anon! I have attempted to write something helpful, but it got very long, so I am putting it behind a cut:

Keeping your art alive when you have to work an unrelated job is not easy. Struggling with it does not mean that you're failing, or that it can't be done, or that you won't get better at it down the road. It's also not the sort of thing where you hit equilibrium and it's all smooth sailing from there. I have gotten better at fitting my writing into my life, and I've figured out strategies and coping mechanisms and how to be better at just making myself do it even if I feel "blocked," but there are still stretches of time where it's harder to manage. Those periods don't last forever, and if it sometimes gets worse, it also sometimes gets better.

I suspect you know all of this, Anon, because you sound like a reasonable person and because you balanced writing and schoolwork, which can itself be tricky. I say it anyway because this is exactly the kind of subject where mean little thoughts like to sneak into your head and make you doubt yourself, and I think we could all use a reminder.

There are many writers who will say that you have to write every single day. Often they will say that you have to write at the same time every single day, or that you need to wake up early to write before work. These writers depress and demotivate me, because I don't actually have a writing "habit" in that there's no schedule or daily goal or set of standards involved. Some days I write a lot and some days I don't write at all. Shaming myself about that fact has never been helpful.

What has been helpful: an increased understanding of my writing process. Realizing I don't have to outline? Helpful! Realizing that generating ideas and fleshing out scenes and shaping the arc of a story and making it pretty are all different skills and some days one comes easier than the others? Helpful! Realizing that I tend to have an "a-hah" moment that tells me what the story is about, after which it's easier to write the story? Helpful! Realizing that if I can't think of an adjective or a line of dialogue or a joke, I can just put an asterisk and come back to it later, instead of halting the entire writing process until I come up with it? Helpful!

I don't know if any of these particular things would be helpful to you, because your writing process probably works differently than mine. Somebody out there absolutely does need to outline before they can write, or so I assume from the fact that it is mandated in virtually every book on writing I have ever read. You studied writing in school, so it's possible that you already have a great understanding of your process; it's also possible you have internalized a lot of other people's ideas of what you're writing should look like. Most of what I know about how I write was learned in the last few years, not in school.

It is also possible that you have a good understanding of what your process looks like when that gets to be the thing that takes up the majority of your time. In which case, you probably need to consider your life and your schedule as it is now. I know, for example, that I don't get much writing done of weekend days where I stay in bed late, even though I still end up with more free time than I'd have on a weekday, so if I want to write on a weekend I need to get up. Are there any times of day, or the days of the week, or the places where it is easier to write? What factors make it harder to write? Can you minimize those factors? When you can't, because you livelihood depends on them, can you acknowledge them as a fact of life and forgive yourself for being affected by them?

It's unpleasant but undeniable that working impacts writing. We aren't able to spend the time we'd like to on writing. We don't have the energy and focus that we had in school, when our writing was our main responsibility. Now our primary responsibility is making enough money to survive, and if that makes us sad to think about, well, it's only going to make us sadder if on top of that we try to hold ourselves to the amount of writing we'd do if that weren't true.

It isn’t strictly a numbers game where more time = more writing, which I think can be reassuring for those of us who don’t get as much time as we’d like for writing. I was unemployed or working part-time for the entirety of 2016 and I did not do more writing in 2016 than I am now. I had more time, but I was much more of a mess, as a person, and I wasn't as dedicated to writing. In a counter-intuitive way, I think it can help to have creative outlets besides writing. It does take time away from something that you already don’t get as much time as you want to do, but it means that you have a place to be creative even when the words aren't coming, a place with less pressure and lower stakes. I've done improv pretty casually for the last couple of years, and aside from the fact that I think improv in particular can be extremely helpful for writers, it means that when I've been unhappy with my writing, I could show up to improv and do a silly voice or shuffle around in a crabwalk and know that I had created something.

These are some things that have helped me write while also working: Improv. Mindfulness about writing. Mindfulness about life in general. Prioritizing my writing (guys, I watch so much less television than I used to). Therapy and medication, to be honest. Remembering why I am excited about the projects that I’m working on. Giving myself freedom to start new stories while also encouraging myself to finish old ones. Having an audience to share things with, because it is hard to write without knowing that anyone will ever read what you are pouring so much of yourself into.

It has taken me a few days to answer this, Anon, because I wanted to give a considered response, and also just because adult life! so busy! I keep coming back to the questions of whether I am emotionally satisfied with the writing I am doing, and whether I have a good balance between my writing and my work. Because I really think that I am creatively satisfied right now, and if I am mostly aware of that most of the time, I don't know that I'd really phrased it like that to myself before. If I had then I had forgotten it. And it's a powerful and wonderful thing to be able to say that to myself.

I have a degree in screenwriting, but I have never made a career of it and am not pursuing one now. The dream used to be writing for television. Before that the dream was to be a traditionally published author. Now...I don't know what the dream is. I would like to do original work again some day. I have a novel in my head that is very important to me, whose characters helped me get through some hard times, and I want to give that novel the life that it deserves. I would like to do something with my screenwriting degree at some point, although it will likely never make me money. Sometimes it feels like failure that I don't have a new dream, and that I gave up on the old ones. But for the most part, for now, I'm very happy writing fanfiction. I've written a lot of stories, particularly in the last few years, that I am very proud of.

But I don't actually have a good balance between art and work, inasmuch as my art makes me happy and my work...doesn't. I have a low-level office job in a field that I'm not passionate about or well-suited for. I don't get out of my job a lot of the things that I do get out of writing -- challenge, investment, a chance to be creative, self-direction, fulfillment, purpose. I have never worked a job where I got any of those things, and it is starting to wear me down.

To be fair: "my job pays me a decent wage and gives me great health insurance but it isn't satisfying" is a privileged thing to complain about, and I'm aware of that. I'm also aware that some people handle these situations just fine, that some people don’t mind a job that demands a minimum of energy and time since that leaves them more to put into their art. You may be one of these people! I am discovering that I am not. Getting no sense of accomplishment from my job contributes negatively to my overall mental and emotional health, which is sucky all on its own, but has the additional effect of impacting my writing.

It's a tricky problem, though. I don't, at present, want to make a living off of writing (and such a career would be precarious), but my current resume and skill set doesn't qualify me for much of anything besides the work I'm already doing (thanks, screenwriting degree). Any attempt to find a job that's more fulfilling would likely involve a big investment of time, money, and/or effort in some kind of school and training, and then...I'd be in a job that demanded more from me, and even if it made me happier than my current job does, how much would that leave me to put into my writing?

I don't know if any of this has been helpful to you. It is perhaps not a clear answer to a question that felt clear when I read it but that my mind muddled up along the way. You may find that once you hit a balance between writing and working, you don't mind the day job grind in the same way I do. You may decide that you do want to pursue writing as a career. You may still be figuring out the employment situation at all and my woes may be worse than irrelevant.

But the timing of this ask is funny; I am soon going to apply to an educational program that would prepare me for a new career in a totally different field, and the thought of how this will impact my writing has very much been on my mind. In the past when I've thought about doing anything like this, that question has kept me from going forward: won't that be less of your time, less of your energy, less of you for your writing? I think this is a real concern with a basis in truth: if I get into this program I am going to have a lot less time and energy for anything outside of it, and I will need to again adjust my expectations of what my writing can look like in my circumstances. But I think that this question is also fear and perfectionism talking, using my writing as a weapon against me, and I'm tired of it.

Balance is a funny thing. I'm actually terrible at basically anything that requires balance: biking, rollerskating, gymnastics, ice skating, you name it. I don't see how anyone pulls it off. You can lean too far one way only to fall over the other way when you try to even out. You can take a turn and suddenly the road is uphill or downhill or bumpy, and whatever you were doing before to stay upright isn't cutting it. You can be going along just fine and then, for absolutely no reason, you're wobbling all over the place. But you can also do a hell of a lot of wobbling without ever falling down.

I think it's just about...paying attention to what's happening around you. Paying attention to what you're feeling and what you want. Not getting fooled by something you're supposed to want if you don't actually want it. Figuring out the things that you need, and the things that would make your life better, and the things that you'd like, and prioritize those accordingly.

I sure hope that's how it works, at least, because that's all I've got. I might royally fuck up my life in the next couple of months, but if I do, I'll adjust and keep going. It can't be any worse than fucking ice skating.

Best of luck, Anon.

#writing #Anonymous

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less-than-hash · 5 years ago

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A Lot to Process

I haven’t been making games lately, but that doesn’t mean I’ve not been writing. I took off at the beginning of the year to work on my prose fiction, finished drafting a novel provisionally titled These Subtle Games back in March, and finished revising it and began querying it last month. It’s a contemporary occult fantasy set in Boston, following a nonbinary game developer investigating the untimely and mysterious demise of her mentor, only to find herself drawn into a morass of conspiratorial cabals, mystical mobsters, and misogynist massholes - not to mention a sprawling hidden ARG that may or may not contain the secrets of New England cunning magic.

It’s basically autobiography.

In the meantime, I’ve begun writing a new novel, an industrial fantasy set in a world of sprawling empires both challenged and propped up by powerful mercantile houses and an aggressively expansionist church ruled by wizards. I found that the process I stumbled through in developing and writing These Subtle Games - a process that, despite the differences in media, grew out of my experience creating games - worked really well for me, so I’ve been following a more refined version for the new novel with similarly positive results. Furthermore, I’ve already begun applying it to a potential sequel to TSG. With Novelember coming up, I figured I’d share a little of that process with you.

The goals of my writing process are twofold:

To apply some level of organization to my work, lest it follow in the footsteps of my first novel, which was basically “write until you’re done writing, and now you’ve got 141,000 words of experimental weirdness.”

To allow a lot of flexibility, preventing said organization from stifling my creativity.

Details below the cut.

PRE-PRODUCTION, aka Background, Research, and Planning

I spend a lot of time with the concept for a novel (or a conversation in a game) before I begin writing anything that’ll make it into even the rough draft. Note that I didn’t use the “before I put pen to paper” metaphor here, because I do a lot of writing at this stage. Much of this is simple note-taking, whether on research or on ideas. I do a fair amount of this in an actual notebook, often because I’m off somewhere away from my computer.

Because this phase generally overlaps with the late phases of a previous project, and when I’m actually at my computer I’m generally working on the older piece. I was in this phase for Hidden Sanctum while recording VO for Seeker, Slayer, Survivor, for example, and for These Subtle Games while wrapping up my work on the Deadfire expansions.

I like to overlap projects like this for a few reasons:

It allows me to move smoothly from active work on one project to the next.

It engages a different part of my mind than drafting prose, keeping me fresh.

Because I spend a lot of time exploring an idea, it helps me determine whether or not I think the idea’s strong enough to sustain me through a project.

Things I do while planning:

Read extensively. I read work in the same vein or genre as the work I’m intending to write. In preparation for Deadfire, for example, I read The Gentleman Bastards books by Scott Lynch, Uprooted by Naomi Novik, and Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames. Prior to starting work on These Subtle Games I read Procession of the Dead by Darren Shan, War in Heaven by Charles Williams, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami, Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Lieber, Conversion by Katherine Howe, the Atlanta Burns books by Chuck Wendig, A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, and Himself by Jess Kidd, among others. Before beginning the current novel, I read Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo, The Incorruptibles by John Horner Jacobs, Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan, and Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, among other works. These are books I read specifically because I planned to do work in similar spaces. I approach these books analytically to get a sense of what’s been done before, as well as what might and might not work from a structural or stylistic standpoint. What I want to do and what I want to avoid. Nor do I limit myself to books. As part of my pre-production for my current project I watched Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Les Miserable, L’Empereur de Paris, The Age of Innocence, and Carnival Row, as well as replaying parts of the Dishonored games. I also made myself a music playlist, the heart of which is Postmodern Jukebox’s cover of “Welcome to the Black Parade.”

Research broadly. I’m less of the school that one should write what they know than that they should know what they write. I generally write fantastic works, but without an understanding of matters related to the fantasy, the product feels hollow. This can include research into the history of sail and piracy, for example, or military technology, or fashion. For These Subtle Games I read numerous books on New England folklore and cunning folk, as well as on witch trials, both in Salem and globally. I read a lot about Harvard’s study of psychedelics, including Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind. I also did a tremendous amount of deeply unpleasant research into online harassment. At this point in the process, I try to prioritize the forest for the trees (hence “broadly” above). I don’t need to know every maritime term to plot content set on a sailing vessel, I just need to know the broad strokes of how ships work, how the crew lives, and how that might impact someone living on the sea. My current project required a fair amount of exploration of subjects as diverse as industrial era mill towns, the history of the American and French revolutions, and dinosaurs. While doing this research, I keep an eye out for things I find interesting that can inform my plot. I’d never heard of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, for example, but reading about it inspired a plot point in the current project. That said, I don’t feel like I need to be an expert at this stage on anything I hope to write about. I’m almost certainly going to discard ideas and discover new ones as I go along, and I’ll have to dig deep into things like boot styles and fishing vessels (to pick two subjects from yesterday’s writing) as I go.

Figure out what I want to say. Here I work to nail down the broadest themes I want to explore in a work. These usually arise from a combination of my research and reflecting on the things I find interesting about whatever I’m making the subject of my project. Initially These Subtle Games was titled The Quiet Game (a title already claimed by a murder mystery set in Massachusetts) because of its interest in secrets (as reflected in the secret societies of Boston, the NDAs of the games industry, and the arcana of ARGs like the Jejune Institute). The new novel examines colonialism, capitalism, and power, as well as what actions are justified when resisting an overwhelming force. The three DLC for Deadfire interrogate the relationships between the gods of Eora and their followers, the Watcher included. Defining this helps guide all of the work to come, providing a benchmark by which to judge the effectiveness of an idea, plot point, or piece of writing.

Build out the world. These Subtle Games is set in modern Boston and Deadfire in Eora, both worlds that were well-defined long before I began creating fiction set in them. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t spend time fleshing out the corners of those worlds I intended to work within. TSG required that I determine the form of a fictionalized Boston games industry, as well as the shape of the secret cultures that inform the action of the novel. For Deadfire, each piece of content, each world map event, and each DLC island is a little world of its own, with its own story that feeds back into the larger ideas of the game. (Of course, I wasn’t working in a vacuum, nor alone.) The current project, set in a new fantasy world, required the creation of a rough geography and history, populated with peoples, nations, and faiths. I designed these not merely to have verisimilitude, but to feed into the goals of the work. In the case of the new project, that meant huge colonial powers jockeying for the dwindling unclaimed territories and their resources, vast trade companies conspiring to wrest power from the entrenched nobility, a clergy focused on enforcing the rule of the gods over every nation of the world, and several species of magically-crafted servitors provided curtailed rights when they’re afforded any freedom at all. Here, again, I prefer to take a diffuse approach. I can get by with the broad strokes, and leaving things undefined offers me more room to maneuver as I write. I personally also find it useful to gather art references at this stage. I have a folder of illustrations that suggest the mood and style of the world of the new project, for example. For These Subtle Games, I commissioned an illustration of my protagonist from the fantastic Katorius (below).

Sketch out the major characters. Generally by this point I’ve got ideas for at least a few of the characters, but before I start writing I want to have a strong sense of who each of those characters is. I generally write a few pages about the major players, their background, their attitudes, their role in the plot. This is worldbuilding, albeit with a narrowed focus, so the rules above apply: I try to keep things vague and flexible. I knew at this stage, for example, that These Subtle Games protagonist Laurie’s best work friend Meri grew up in California, and that if she lost her job, she might move back. That she was a surfer and played ska were details that came out in the writing. She also grew from being only moral support to providing occasional practical aid to Laurie, as well as coming to rely on Laurie in turn. Similarly, in the current project, the six characters the novel focuses on, something of a band of scoundrels, shifted over the course of development from their sketches. The relationship between two characters who are fugitives from the imperial government, for example, changed dramatically. Whereas they had been initially written as an inseparable pair, I found it much more interesting if they were on the outs after years of traveling and working together, adding (another) fracture in the crew’s interpersonal dynamics. I’ve talked before about how Vatnir went from being a charming con-artist to a grumpy reluctant messiah after I saw concept art for him. Similarly, I knew from my first moments with Serafen that he possesses no qualms about employing violence in the course of his work; the delineations, though, that he creates for himself regarding when violence is appropriate was something developed over the course of writing him.

Identify big tentpole moments. Here’s the first bit of actual plot work. At this point I’ve likely got ideas of notes I absolutely want to hit. I knew, for example, that I wanted Laurie, the protagonist of These Subtle Games, to discover an object late in the novel that redefines her relationship to her uncle and her understanding of his role in the mystery she’s unraveling. Inspired by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, I knew I wanted the crew in the new project to be party to the inadvertent destruction of a textile mill, one made all the worse for its owners having locked the workers within. In both cases, these moments speak directly to the ideas I’m exploring in the work. Once I’ve identified a few of my tentpoles, I order them in a way that makes dramatic sense to me, and that gives me not an outline, exactly, but guideposts for the narrative. As mentioned so many times above, the goal is to provide myself guidance, not to hem myself in or nail down every plot point.

Once I’m relatively comfortable with my sense of where I’m taking a work, I begin writing what I call my “plot doc.”

PRE-ALPHA, aka The Plot Doc

I don’t generally outline my work. I go from the extremely rough tentpole step mentioned above into a kind of extremely rough draft I call my plot doc. These provide the skeleton and heart of the novel onto which I can layer the muscle and flesh of actual writing. The plot doc is pretty long - the one for These Subtle Games was 49,000 words, about half the length of the finished novel. The plot doc for the current project weighs in at 31,000 words.

Almost none of these words will end up in the actual book as-is.

I care very little about the state of the writing at this step. Here I’m exploring the plot and the characters, drafting out how they go from tentpole to tentpole, figuring out what in the narrative works and hopefully identifying what doesn’t. I find where I’ve failed to establish needed details in my worldbuilding and further define my characters.

This step actually developed directly from my work in narrative design. Generally I (like many of the narrative designers I know) stub out a branching conversation before writing it, creating a kind of detailed outline (where everything is written with the same lack of polish as the LRs pictured in my post about interjections). This lets us establish the flow of the conversation, plot its structure without having to worry too much about details of style, and hopefully locate any holes or major bugs prior to fleshing out the file. Generally the text in stubs would be difficult to mistake for shippable writing.

I personally find stubbing out conversations useful because I think differently during the mechanical work of structuring files than I do during the artistic work of crafting dialog and prose. I’ve found a similar division of labor incredibly useful when crafting plot. It relieves a lot of the pressure of writing, too. I don’t have to worry about both building a functional plot and writing enticing prose. Because I’m going to be the only person ever reading the plot doc.

(Unless, of course, I do something ridiculous like share pieces of it on my tumblr.)

Here’s an excerpt from the plot doc for These Subtle Games, which I’ll contrast with later versions below:

A car awaits her in Gloucester, and it brings her to Matthias’s house. It’s a sizable home, stone, and old, somewhat decrepit, even. Ivy climbs the turrets, and the copper roof has gone to streaked verdigris. He stands in the open door as she approaches, and she hugs him, grateful for the familiar, and he returns the gesture stiffly, patting her lightly on the back. He’s tall and rail thin, built much as she is, with a well-kept beard and receding hair. He feels old-fashioned to her, in a dressing gown and pajamas with warm, soft house shoes.

Hello, niece, he says.

Hello, uncle.

He offers her food, which she declines, and takes her to her room, just off the main room.

Ouch. It’s little more than stream of consciousness, just me getting the ideas out onto the page. Or 200 pages, in the case of this project.

ALPHA, aka The Rough Draft

Once I’ve completed the plot doc, I begin actually writing. I do this in a new file, referring to the plot doc for guidance as I go along. Often I do this a little inconsistently, letting myself write until I hit a lull before returning to the plot doc. That way the plot doc serves not merely a guiding role, but a motivating function.

The rough draft is the first actual composition I’m doing on the work, and much of it actually ends up in the finished version. I take significantly more time on each scene, on each sentence, trying to craft prose that breathes and dialog that feels real.

I also tend to be a bit loose and experimental at this stage. I play around, writing things that I find interesting to read. If I find myself weighing style against readability, I generally err on the side of style. I can clean shit up later.

Here’s the scene from before, taken from the rough draft:

The car Matthias hired lets Laurie off at the gate, which creaks opens on hydraulic pistons as she leaves her tip.

The driver nods towards the tree-lined darkness. “Hop back in, and I’ll run you up. Real door to door service. If you’d like.”

Having relaxed at an exponential rate with each mile she put between herself and the city, Laurie shakes her head with a faint smile. “I could use the walk.”

“You don’t think you’re fat, do you?” His gaze flits the length of her from knees to shoulders, efficiently dispelling the enchantment worked by the commuter rail ride through the dense New England night.

“What? No.”

“Because you’re a beanpole. Almost too skinny, if you ask me.”

She hadn’t. “That’s not what I meant. Just, I want to clear my head, thanks.”

He leaves her to it, and she walks up the curling drive towards the old stone Victorian. The curtained windows glow faintly from within, and warm lamps jut from the quoins. Sprawling ivy climbs the turrets, and rooftop copper has long given way to white-streaked verdigris. Matthias’s is a stately home, but aging, much like the man himself. He meets her at the door in a dressing gown over fine silk pajamas and plush slippers. Her uncle stands as long and lanky as Laurie, with high cheekbones, a higher forehead, and a well-trimmed beard.

She greets him with a hug. She keeps it gentler than she might like, given his age. He’s never appeared frail, exactly, but his features profess a wary delicateness, as if he’d been crafted of pudding cloth and porcelain.

“Niece,” he says quietly, squeezing her shoulder.

“Uncle,” she answers. It’s an old ritual, and with it Laurie’s remaining fear falls away, abandoning her to her exhaustion.

He admits her to the house, the pair padding silently across polished marble past floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Matthias’s home gives the impression of being larger on the inside than the out, a space out of time, populated by statues of stone and painted ceramic. A grand piano dominates one corner, the instrument on which Esme had performed several family recitals during Thanksgiving gatherings past. At thirteen, Laurie’d lugged her hollow-bodied electric through two airports and two more trains to her uncle’s house. After Esme played, Laurie’d produced the guitar and performed a show of her own, all barre and power chords joined to lyrics roundly condemning the evils of industrial capitalism and hypocrisy of American evangelism in terms both suggestive and explicit. The gathered family had clapped politely enough, but she later overheard her father’s sister thank him for leaving the amplifier back in Carrboro.

Esme had told Laurie she’d loved it.

“Are you hungry?” Uncle Matthias asks her as they pass the sliding double doors to the dining room and the kitchen beyond.

She shakes her head. “I’m very full of food, but thank you.”

The scene’s significantly longer now, and I’ve further defined the driver, detailed the house, and defined aspects of Laurie’s relationship to it and her family. And hey, now it’s got quotation marks!

Once I finish the rough draft, I celebrate a bit. Hey, I wrote a fucking novel!

But I don’t share. I know I’m not happy with the work yet. I’m sure it’s riddled with grammatical errors. It’s probably got some questionable shifts in verb tense. It likely sports an inconsistency or six. I know I can do better, so I set out to do so.

BETA, aka The First and Second Revision

Here’s where the hard work of revision begins. I read the book, taking notes on things I’d like to change, then go through carefully, making both the changes I’d noted and performing close editing. I try to polish overwritten lines and clarify confusing sentences. I look for inconsistencies, especially when moving scenes around.

Were this a conversation in a game, this would be the point I marked it for review by a lead or solicit feedback from QA and my fellow designers. Having done a revision or two on a book, I’m feeling pretty confident in what I’ve made, so I give it to any beta readers I’ve enlisted, that they might remind me that I do, in fact, have a long-ass way to go before it’s good.

GOLD, aka The “Finished” Product

Once I’ve got feedback from my readers (and have perhaps let the book sit for a bit to work on pre-production for an upcoming project - or just played a shit-ton of Final Fantasy XIV...), I return to the novel or conversation to polish it further.

At this point I’m looking to flesh out details, to make sure each sentence serves a purpose. To chop off unnecessary phrases and to make sure each interaction is bringing out the characters’ personalities.

Here’s the fourth (and currently final) revision of the scene from above:

Matthias’s hired car deposits Laurie at his gate, a break in the thick stone wall that separates the street from her uncle’s plot of dense, quiet woods. Hickories and pines obscure the sky, swaying gently on a salted breeze off of the Atlantic. As Laurie tips the driver, a pair of heavy, wrought iron hinges creak open with the low hiss of hydraulic pistons.

The man nods towards the tree-lined darkness, his gray hair half-circumscribing his bald pate. “Hop back in, and I’ll run you up. Real door to door service. If you’d like.”

Having relaxed exponentially with each mile she put between herself and the city—a charm cast by the long commuter rail ride through the dense New England night—Laurie shakes her head. “I could use the walk.”

“You don’t think you’re fat, do you?” His gaze flits the length of her, from knees to shoulders, efficiently dispelling the enchantment.

“What? No.”

“Because you’re a beanpole. Almost too skinny, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t.” Her fingernails bite her palms.

“Sure, suit yourself.” His window whispers back into place.

He pulls away, and she waits for his taillights to withdraw around the bend before walking the curled drive towards the old stone Victorian. The curtained windows glow faintly from within, and warm lamps jut from the quoins. Sprawling ivy climbs the turret, and rooftop copper has long given way to white-streaked verdigris. Matthias’s is a stately home but aging, not unlike the man himself. He meets her at the door in a dressing gown over fine silk pajamas and plush slippers. As long and lanky as his niece, Laurie’s uncle’s features add high cheekbones to a higher forehead and a well-trimmed beard.

She greets him with a gentle hug—gentler than she’d prefer, what with his age. He’s never struck her as frail, exactly, but his features profess a wary delicateness, as if he’d been crafted of pudding cloth and porcelain.

“Niece,” he says quietly, squeezing her shoulder.

“Uncle,” she answers. It’s an old ritual, and with it Laurie’s lingering fear falls away, abandoning her to her exhaustion. Her trapezius slackens beneath her uncle’s hand, her scapulae sinking as her frustration flows down her arms and through her twitching fingers. They flick the remnants away.

The pair pad silently across polished marble tiles past floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Matthias’s home gives the impression of being larger on the inside than the out, a space out of time, populated by statues of horses, deer, and dryads in stone and painted ceramic. A grand piano dominates one corner, an instrument on which Esme had performed a series of recitals following Thanksgiving dinners past. At thirteen, Laurie’d lugged her hollow-bodied electric through two airports and two more trains to her uncle’s house. After Esme played, Laurie’d produced the guitar and performed a show of her own, joining steely barre and power chords to lyrics condemning the evils of industrial capitalism and hypocrisy of American evangelism—in terms both suggestive and explicit. The family had clapped politely enough, but later she overheard her father’s sister thank him for leaving the amplifier back in Carrboro.

Esme, of course, had told Laurie she’d loved it. “Maybe my favorite song ever,” she’d said, the liar.

“Are you hungry?” Uncle Matthias asks her as they pass the sliding double doors to the dining room and the kitchen beyond.

Having stopped into a pizza joint on her way to North Station and walked out with a distended Styrofoam clamshell heavy with waffle fries drenched in cheese studded with olives, tomatoes, and jalapenos, she shakes her head. “I’m very full of food, but thank you.”

It’s not hugely different from the rough draft, but there’s a lot more detail, and the weaker phrases have been excised. Matthias no longer “admits her to the house,” for example, because it’s implied that she’s come in by the action. The details at the end about the waffle fries fill an inconsistency in the rough draft: originally Laurie’d eaten nothing that day, so why was she full here? (Deeply interesting, I know.)

Laurie’s decision to snap back at the driver about his unasked for critique of her appearance was a result of beta reader feedback. The additional details about the decor in Matthias’s house subtly ties him to the locations of secret societies Laurie visits later in the book, details I’d not developed until the prior draft. The use of anatomical language to describe Laurie’s body reflects the character’s distance from it. She views it as something of an animate corpse she happens to inhabit rather than a core aspect of her self. Finally, Esme’s response is presented in dialog now, injecting her character into the scene and allowing the prose narration to reflect Laurie’s personality.

Nothing’s really done though. There are more hands for it to go through. Just as a game conversation undergoes changes suggested by QA, shifts in the recording booth, and may end up trimmed or entirely cut due to schedule and budget constraints or even to fix a nasty bug, a novel goes through several hands between the point where the author’s ready to query it and a publisher’s willing to put it on a shelf. But eventually you have to make the decision to be done with a piece, to mark it complete in JIRA and push it down the pipeline.

Then you get to move on to whatever’s next.

Cheers, <#

#fiction #novel writing #prose #process #gamedev #game design #narrative design #worldbuilding

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relationshipsandpolitics · 5 years ago

Text

How I Alienated My Potential Readers Part #2

And we’re back. Here’s how we are looking after Part 1:

Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Corey Booker, Bernie Sanders, Julian Castro, Beto O’ Rourke, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, John Delaney, Pete Buttigieg

Well, some things have changed so we can just go ahead and remove Beto, which is a shame because I had a good rant about him sucking. Alas, my genius will have to wait.

Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Corey Booker, Bernie Sanders, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, John Delaney, Pete Buttigieg

I debated where to put climate change in this breakdown. For me, climate change is issue #1b for me. If a candidate denied it, that would be an automatic disqualifier. It should be for every voter. But I am surprised about how we all agree this is a dire issue that needs to be dealt with immediately, but the only candidate who made it their chief issue, Governor Jim Inslee, got virtually no support and was one of the first to drop out. We really talk out of both sides of our mouth on climate change. We all agree it is going to kill us, but we don’t seem to prioritize it, do we? I have some thoughts about that, but I digress.

The good news is all remaining candidates agree climate change is happening and that we need to act. The bad news is many of the candidates do not appear willing to take those drastic steps needed to stave off the worst outcomes. This is a problem. Even the remaining candidates who are best on this issue leave a lot to be desire. As it stands, I’m not removing anyone because no one is Republican levels of awful on the issue, but also no one meets the bar that needs to be set on genuine change. But seriously, we are all awful on this issue, me included. We need to be taking steps in out personal lives to cut back on carbon emissions, and we need to be willing to pay more to save our planet. The truth is if the leading scientific minds announced that to save our planet, we needed to raise taxes by 2% on everyone, we’d instead spend double that to buy front row seats to the end of the world. We as a people truly suck.

Now let’s finally get into the issues that differentiate the candidates. This is really the whole game for me. Because there are certain issues I care about tremendously, issues that I feel we need to address if this country is going to survive or if we will slip fully into the oligarchy we seem destined towards. I’m talking about corporate power and workers’ rights. Look, we all know the stats. Income inequality is worse now than at any time since the Gilded Age. That preceded the Great Depression. Billionaires and corporations hold more power than the bottom 95% of the population combined. They can write a measly $5,000 check and get face time with the most powerful politicians in the country, and another $5,000 check gets them their full support. I know this because part of my job is to write those checks. I don’t try to get into too much about what I do, but suffice it say I work within politics very much behind the scenes. I don’t like what I do, even if I believe in the interests I advocate for. People like me should not exist, but our corrupt political system not only enables me, but empowers me.

We all want a candidate we can trust to act in the average American’s best interest. But we so willingly elect people who knowingly fuck us over in favor of the rich and corporate interests that it’s a wonder they even bother going through the motions trying to appease us. And what have we got for it? Unions have been decimated as lawmakers pass corporate-sponsored Right to Work laws. Wages have stagnated while wealth for the top 1% has skyrocketed. Americans are more productive than ever but seeing a smaller share of that productivity. Compared to all other industrialized nations, we offer no guaranteed paid vacation, family leave, or health care. This is despite being the richest nation in the world. College is a necessity to obtain a well-paying job, yet it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to obtain, meaning anyone graduating with loans will be paying them off until they retire. Or die.

These developments are not a coincidence. They are the results of deliberate efforts by monied interests. Next, they will come after Social Security and Medicare, claiming we need to reign in the deficit. And both Republicans and Democrats will heed their call, and we will buy their sudden concern about deficits. They’ll vote to raise the retirement age and cut benefits, we’ll get mad, and then re-elect them anyway.

How does this rant relate to the upcoming 2020 elections? It relates because the next decade will mark the point of no return, in my estimation. Either this country will wake up to getting screwed and finally vote to do something about it, or it will cement its acceptance of the status quo. Our descent into oligarchy has been relatively gradual because even the Democratic administrations have done little to stem the tide. They’ve just slowed it down by promoting policies benefiting the rich while throwing tokens of support to the working class, which is everybody else. They bump up the income tax rates slightly while ignoring the ways the rich really make their money. They threaten anti-trust lawsuits but never follow through. They bail out the banks and refuse to prosecute the heads of those banks. Then they appoint them to run the Treasury Department. Republicans do these same things; they are just more brazen about it. Whereas Democrats will announce tighter regulations on businesses but include weak enforcement and huge loopholes, Republicans simply get rid of the regulations. Republicans cut the taxes of the rich, Democrats keep them at the status quo.

The next president has a unique opportunity to finally right the wrongs of decades of neo-liberal fiscal policy. They can bring the country in line with the rest of the democratic world by pushing policies that help the poor, working and middle classes. Young parents would be able to afford to have a child. College graduates would be able to afford to buy home and have a crazy thing called disposable income because their college debt was wiped out and college itself became affordable. People would stop fucking dying because they don’t have health care. Seriously, on this last point, what in the ever-loving fuck is wrong with people for not being willing to raise their taxes to fund universal health care?

We need to begin assessing potential candidates by what they want to accomplish to fix this issue. And we can best determine if they will remain mired in the status quo of empty gestures and corporate checks, or if they will fight for us, by their words and actions. With that in mind, I’m going to base my choice on whether the remaining candidates can be expected to support the fundamental restructuring of government and wealth equality. I think you all know where I’m going with this one.

Corey Booker, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, John Delaney – The Technocratic Legislators

Here you have some good moderate Democratic legislators. Booker, Harris and Klobuchar are sitting U.S. Senators while Delaney is a former Representative. I don’t really have an issue with any of them, save maybe Delaney. They all are effective legislators, even if they may be more moderate than I’d like. I particularly like Booker and Harris as people if not politicians. But at the end of the day, I can’t really rely on them to push the things that need to be front and center. I don’t exactly know what their broad policy even is. Sure, they will come out with a good sound bite or a good proposal on some smaller but still important issue. Booker is doing great things on tackling issues facing inner city youths. Harris is good on gun reform. But Booker is way too closely tied with Big Pharma. Harris has an awful record on criminal justice and did nothing to help homeowners defrauded during the housing crisis.

They both illustrate a major concern we should all share. When you have a record of being too cozy with some terrible industries, it shows that the voters can’t truly trust you to have their back. Campaign contributions are par for the course. You need them to win elections. But when you take a disproportionate amount of money from very specific industries, it means you are probably bought by them. Don’t be surprised if Booker nominates a Pharmaceutical lobbyist to head up CMS. And when private equity managers donate to Harris, as Blackstone’s Tia Breakley did in March, 2019, they are doing so because there is a reasonable belief that Harris and others won’t come after them.

Again, I think Harris and Booker are good people and good legislators. And the critique about money is not limited to them, as I plan on thoroughly ripping into Buttigieg and Biden on it. But when you take these facts along with the truth that neither candidate is pushing the sort of structural reforms needed in this country, I think it’s fair to say their presidencies would be rather unremarkable.

Amy Klobuchar and Jon Delaney share the money problem, but they have so much more going for them! Klobuchar treats her staff like absolute shit, which only matters when you remember that we are relying on her to protect all low-level workers. She clearly has contempt for people beneath her on the career ladder, and a wise woman once said “when a person shows you who they are, believe them.”

Klobuchar and Delaney have spent their entire campaign advocating not for what they believe, but for trashing other candidates who dare to dream. Klobuchar and Delaney come from the school of Democratic politicians who believe things are too hard to try, and we might lose Republican voters by trying to be Democrats. The Klobuchar’s and Delaney’s of the world would be happy to adopt every major Republican fiscal position if it meant they got to be President. Also, Delaney is the moron who thought it was a good idea to trash Medicare for All at the California Democratic convention.

I would vote for Harris and Booker and not feel bad about it. I’d feel weird about voting for Klobuchar, and Delaney has as much chance of the nomination as Scott Baio. They are out.

Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Julian Castro, Pete Buttigieg

We’re going to go after the young guns now. The candidates we all secretly wish were just a bit better so that we didn’t have to choose from three candidates in their 70’s. But these candidates are ultimately empty shells of better candidates who seem too concerned with appearing like the rational voice in the room to have a vision for our country.

Let’s start with Mayor Pete Buttigieg. I was talking with my mother about who she was going to support in the primary. Let me be clear that I did not initiate this conversation. I’d literally rather talk to my mother about our respective sex lives than politics. But my mother has a bit of a control issue, and this blog was cheaper than therapy.

Anyway, my mother said she was supporting either Biden (shocking, I know) or Buttigieg. She said she liked that he was young, and it was great he was gay. I asked my mom what positions of his did she support, and she couldn’t really name any except that he didn’t support Medicare for All. This was a selling point for her. See, my mother represents a huge segment of the Democratic base that is upper middle class, socially liberal (except Kaepernick should’ve stood) and fiscally moderate (aka conservative but they swear they have homeless friends). What this really means is they are Democrats when it doesn’t hurt them to be. They think what’s going on at the border is abhorrent, but they know someone who was mugged by an “illegal” and we need a wall. And they support the idea of everyone having health insurance, but no way will that mean they have to pay more in taxes. They agree housing is too expensive, but then they’ll oppose affordable housing development in their neighborhoods because they attract a “bad element.” For these people, Buttigieg is the ideal candidate. They get to keep their money and nice gated communities, but because he is gay they can call themselves progressive. Plus, we know Buttigieg won’t do anything monstrous like keeping refugees locked up or denying basic rights to LGTBQ people, so how could anyone not support him?

Well, let me be the first to say that Pete Buttigieg is awful. First, keep in mind this guy is the Mayor of South Bend. That’s less a city and more a place for Notre Dame fanboys to “romance” the gold helmets in a sleazy motel. He won his last election with 8,500 votes. And he still managed to piss off a sizable number of his constituents by botching police relations with the black community. And now people think he can run a country. But he’s taken seriously because he raised a boatload of money and the pundits (also rich white people generally) like him. Never mind where that money is coming from and what favors he now owes to those people, right?

Mayor Pete came out for Medicare for All but decided when it was political opportune to trash it using Republican talking points. His actual healthcare plan is truly awful. Pete Buttigieg is the darling candidate for voters who don’t want anything to change, like my mother. They have good health insurance. They own their house and see it as an asset, not a noose. They don’t have any student debt, mainly because they attended college when it cost the equivalent of an iPhone. Buttigieg is a technocrat with a nice haircut. He is a lot like Obama, minus the everything. But his message is one of comfort to the people who own vacation homes in upstate New York and tie rainbow bandannas around their dog’s neck for Pride Week. Under a Buttigieg administration, civility will return and nothing else will change. If the biggest criticism of Sanders and Warren is they have pie-in-the-sky ideas, then Buttigieg’s biggest critique is he has no ideas. It’s just sad how little that matters to the people who will decide this election.

Julian Castro: you’re next. Here’s someone I kind of like. He is great on housing, one of the core issues keeping Americans from feeling secure. I live in an area once considered cheap for housing. But that’s changing. They keep building and building but rents still shoot higher and higher. Sometimes I feel the laws of supply and demand don’t work with housing. I mean, it works when there is low supply and high demand like in Los Angeles and San Francisco. But where I live, there is plenty of supply, yet rents are increasing as much as 10% year over year. Likely this is because demand is still high to live near an urban center. It doesn’t matter if there are tons of vacant units. Renters are willing to pay the cost and don’t do a good job shopping around. Also, as rents continue to soar while jobs continue to navigate towards major cities and people continue to need to live near those jobs, our commutes will get longer and longer. This means more cars on the road, more pollution in the air. Solving the housing crisis means putting a huge dent in climate change. No one seems to understand the impact of not having affordable housing, but Castro comes fairly close. I think I would go for him if he wasn’t so milquetoast on every other issue. He gets completely lost in the shuffle. I think Castro supports Medicare for All? I mean, I do know where he stands because I follow this stuff closely, but it should be clear to the average voter. Castro is young, attractive and is relatively progressive compared to the field. But he isn’t charismatic. He doesn’t articulate his message clearly enough, and my big concern is whether he can create a narrative that gives his administration a chance to pass meaningful legislation. It’s not that I can’t get on board with Castro based on policy, but I just don’t think he has the chops to get it done. Castro’s other problem is he doesn’t speak to workers’ rights issues enough. He pays them lip service, and I’m sure he believes in increasing union membership and raising the minimum wage. I just can’t envision him fighting hard for those issues once in office. I, quite frankly, see him as another politician pushing incremental change on some areas and tackling the low hanging fruit issues of the Democratic base rather than swinging for the fences.

Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders

And then there were three. I think we all knew it was coming down to these three. Let’s not kid ourselves here. We know who is getting the next ax, but the bottom line is these are the three true contenders and until things change, they are the only horses in the race. So we will tackle them together in Part 3, which is hopefully coming soon.

#politics #2020 #bernie sanders #pete buttgieg #elizabeth warren #joe biden #kamala harris #corey booker #elections #2020 election #democrats #julian castro

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hypertensiongamedev · 7 years ago

Note

You are a source of inspiration..Any recommendations if someone wanted to make a game of their own? (I.e what programs to use, things to look out for, etc)

I’ll get the expected answers out first. Here’s the programs I use (and the plugins I use for each of those):

Blender, which I use for modeling, rigging, and animating

Rigify plugin for rig creation (this comes bundled with Blender, you just have to enable it)

RetopoFlow for retopologizing high-poly to low-poly (has a free version in Github, the paid version just entitles you to technical support)

Substance Painter for texturing (this sometimes goes on sale on Steam, so watch out for it every time Steam goes on a discount sale)

Photoshop CC for creating GUI art, and image manipulation needs ($10 per month sounds fair for all the things it could do for me)

Unity for the game engine

StrangeIoC, an open-source code framework (I explain what it is exactly here)

TextMesh Pro for the GUI labels (free)

ShaderForge for making my own shaders (used to be paid, but it’s now free)

InControl, for user customization of controls (has an old, free version in github)

Unity’s Post-processing Stack for visual effects (free)

A custom AI plugin that I made, called INTLord

A custom game editing tool I made that I simply call Attack Editor (for now)

Visual Studio Community Edition (the free version) for the IDE

Resharper plugin for VS is immensely helpful for me (this is pretty expensive, but worth it for me as I use C# heavily)

Git for backup and version control

I use Git Extensions as the front-end GUI

Dropbox and Google Drive for backing up other things like raw art assets

Portable Kanban for keeping a todo list (I can recommend HacknPlan for an online alternative)

But I think the number one thing to look out for here is that, while it seems I’m able to do this game with ease, I can assure you that it is not smooth sailing all the time. I’m only sharing the end result of my work each time I post. All the mistakes and errors I encounter, I tend to discard and not share, but only because I think no one cares to really read about them. My point here is that even when I tell you what programs I use, just using those won’t guarantee you success.

If you’re having a hard time making a game, that doesn’t mean you’re not cut out for this, because I have a hard time too. It’s an inescapable part of something as complex as game development. I think what really makes a person not cut out for this, is when they give up easily when encountering difficult problems, like an overwhelmingly confusing bug, or getting a crash and finding out your work got corrupted. The proper response here is to approach problems methodically instead, and take steps so you tend to not encounter those things again in the future.

Don’t expect to get things perfectly the first time, but do take time and effort to improve each time you blunder.

There’s one pattern I see a lot with beginners who never get far: they love to complain. Don’t end up like that. If after all your best effort and research, things still don’t work, then I can finally concede that you have the right to complain.

These beginners would blame the engine, the programming language, or the art tool if something goes haywire, when, majority of the time, the mistake was their misunderstanding what the tool was for, and a way to solve it was in the user manual. So make sure you’ve done your homework before going on a rant.

Second thing: Practice a lot. They build your skill set. If you have no idea where to start, I suggest just making a simple game like tic-tac-toe in the game engine of your choice. The point here isn’t to build something amazing, it’s to get your feet wet with the tools you’re using. You’ll be doing it more to learn how to get graphics drawn on the screen, how to detect and react to user-input, how to code gameplay logic, etc.

The fact that you’re making a simple tic-tac-toe game helps ease the difficulty curve of trying out a new game engine. Then work out how to put a main menu on it, a highscore that gets saved to a text file, etc.

Then try out making a tetris game, then a side-scrolling platformer, etc. The more familiar you get with your tools, the easier it is to create more and more complex things.

There’s a theory out there that the amount of vocabulary you have with your spoken language influences what you tend to say (or even think!). I think it’s the same with you and your gamedev tools. You might have never gotten around to doing some crazy idea you had, simply because, lacking knowledge in your tools, you didn’t think it was possible.

I do game jam games to try out learning something new.

One thing you need to realize is, if you’re not having fun doing the nitty-gritty details of these steps in game-making, maybe you should reconsider your choice of wanting to make games, because this is how it is all of the time. Or probably at least consider specializing in one aspect instead, and get help with the rest.

The third thing to look out for is having no direction. What really helped me out with making this game is having a clear goal of what I want: a 3d action game about the last days of a terminally-ill henshin hero, taking place in a modern day city.

When you have no clear goal, you have no idea if what you’re currently doing is beneficial or detrimental to your game. You would have no yardstick to measure progress.

It’s fine to experiment without having decided yet what the game will look like, or what genre you’re going for, but I think even among experiments, the good ones are those that have at least some general direction of what they’re trying to test or prove.

This is the earliest photo I could find of my work on the game, dated 2014, Dec. 31. On my pen tablet display there is my early concept for Desparo.

There’s a lot of things to consider when deciding to make a game. I myself was thinking whether I make this game a turn-based, or a real-time action RPG. I was also wondering if I should do it in 2d or 3d, if I go with anime or realistic art style, etc.

I knew I needed to finalize my decisions if I ever hope to progress. I think the proper way to have done it would have been to make a turn-based RPG prototype alongside an action RPG prototype, and then compare the two. But in the end I just went ahead with the real-time action game, simply because I wanted to try out something new.

Sometimes, you start out making a game prototype with just boxes, and deciding it has potential, flesh it out further by attaching a theme/story/premise behind it. I think that’s also a viable approach. It just so happened Ghost Knight Victis started the other way around, with the story first before the gameplay.

And how do you get that spark of an idea of what your game should be? My game’s premise was a culmination of several ideas that have been brewing in my mind for a long time (years). After going through something pretty significant in my life and one lonely December, with two bottles of Tequila and playing through Transistor, all the incongruent ideas started making sense and fit together.

I’m not saying people need to go beat themselves up just to get something “cool”. In fact, if you have a content and happy life, consider yourself lucky if you couldn’t find inspiration to create something really artistic. Because those things tend to come from some deeply-buried, strong feeling, like anger or resentment. Then again, dealing with such thoughts are a normal challenge of growing up, living in a community, or even something as mundane as struggling with where to get a stable income. You just need to change your perspective on where inspiration comes from.

Fourth is to pace yourself properly. Match your expectations with what you can do at the moment. Aim too far out of your comfort zone, and you’ll likely fail, get discouraged, and stop trying. The trick is to aim only a little bit outside your comfort zone. You still compel yourself to improve, but at the same time, it’s a manageable amount of work for you.

Scrum and Kanban are the usual things to learn about here. I personally use Kanban a lot. The idea is simple:

As a task gets further along to completion, the more it moves to the right. But, you have one restriction: only up to 3 tasks at a time can be in the “Doing” column.

This means if you are already devoted to working on 3 tasks in the “Doing” column, and you want to work on something new, you have to finish at least one of those 3 first. This makes you concentrate on getting things done. It stops you from diluting your focus, trying to work on too many things at a time.

You could also decide to move a task from “Doing” back to the “Ready” column. But I normally do it only when either I realize something else is of more importance and I need to stop what I was doing, or perhaps I’m stumped and really can’t progress on that task, in which case I give up and swap it for a different task instead.

Scrum has a lot of techniques, but one thing I take from it is the idea of sprints. You do your work in a per 2-week period, called a sprint. On the start of each sprint, you decide what you will get done, and commit to finishing those tasks within 2 weeks. After those 2 weeks, you again pick which tasks to do for the next 2 weeks, and so on. This is also a method to help you focus on getting things done, because you only concentrate on a few tasks at a time, but it also forces you to take a look at the bigger picture and re-prioritize after every 2 weeks.

In my case, I don’t have 2 weeks. My sprint is only 2 days: every weekend. So I make sure each task I write in a card is achievable within 2 days. If I think a task can’t be finished in 2 days, I divide it into several subtasks.

For example, “obtaining items from chests” might be too complex, so I could divide that to these subtasks:

being able to define chests as a list of the items inside it, and being able to save that data to file

being able to place chests in the map, each chest being: a 3d model of the chest, and the data file saying what items are inside it

create the GUI art for viewing items inside a chest

put the GUI art in-game and adding code to allow it to react to user-input

implement the code for transferring items from a chest to the player’s inventory and vice-versa

Fifth is to concentrate on having a working, playable work-in-progress.

The thing to aim for here is that at the end of each sprint, whatever progress you make should be something that works in-game. It’s fine if you don’t get that all the time, but I think aiming for it helps pull everything towards that direction.

I think this video of Bayonetta’s prototype says a lot:

youtube

For reference, here’s how the final product looks like:

youtube

You can see from that prototype video that you can already start working on the gameplay even if you don’t have the art finalized yet (because the art can take a long time to get done).

I think that’s the wiser method of doing things, you get a playable work-in-progress without being stalled by the fact that the art is incomplete. It’s even better because it’s easier to adjust animations while they’re still rough: it’s less motions to re-arrange and tweak whenever you need to adjust it.

It’s also not good to base your judgement of how correct an animation is from just looking at it in Blender/Maya/etc. alone, because you aren’t seeing it being used in-game. For all you know, the sword attack you’ve been polishing for so many days doesn’t really work because the arc of the sword swing doesn’t really reach the intended target! Or maybe you didn’t realize that the swing is making the sword pass through the ground mesh unintentionally!

Or maybe there’s certain situations where your animation really just needs to be tweaked (when fighting inside narrow hallways, or when you are standing on a flight of stairs & attacking a target below you, etc.). It’s really better to test it out in-game as soon as you’ve established the key frames of your animation.

Frankly, this is something that I should learn to do myself!

And what about for the story? I think this is a neat trick in designing a prototype for your game’s story:

youtube

(the video’s about half an hour long, but it’s worth it)

The basic gist is that you design a “board game” out of your game’s story. And I think that’s the proper way to do things. There’s really more to it than what I just said, so I encourage you all to watch that video.

Sixth is to handle feedback as objectively as you can. As a solo developer, you will tend to see your game as your “baby”, something that in your eyes is a flawless creation.

Maybe you expect players to always do something, but turns out it never crosses their minds at all. That might be a symptom that you need to fix your game’s design.

Be clear with what you are asking feedback for. Just posting screenshots, and a vague “this is my game, suggestions and feedback are welcome!” will not help, because people will tend to give you suggestions that are not in line with the goal you have set in mind for the game, and you end up sounding defensive trying to explain things.

Explain your intent with what you’re specifically showing, and ask for feedback if people think your work achieved that intent or not. But start with a 2 to 3 sentence blurb that describes the premise of your game, to set the tone. Here’s a good tutorial for that.

Take the time to appreciate when people praise you, but don’t let it get to your head.You shouldn’t keep yourself in a circle full of yes-men, you will just not improve there. On the other hand, don’t think that just because you’re being the target of verbal abuse that you are finally getting the so-called brutally honest feedback.

You really have to ignore the emotional parts of what people post, good or bad. Read between the lines of what’s being said, to find the truly useful feedback you want for improvement (if there is even any in their posts).

But don’t just follow every suggestion that comes along your way. Sift through it and think about why someone said what they said.

In my first playable demo, many were complaining that the player should be allowed to move more responsively, to be able to cancel attacks into movement. But that went against my intention of giving it a Dark Souls type of combat (instead of a Dynasty Warriors style of combat).

I realized, people were having that problem because I placed far too many enemies in the level. No one suggested that I lessen the amount of enemies, but that was really my mistake with that one.

So there really was a problem, but their suggestion was not the best way to fix it.

Another example: When Magicka was still being developed, some beta testers complained that friendly fire ruins the experience, and kept suggesting to remove it, or at least have the option to disable it. But the developers doubled down on their decision to have friendly-fire, because friends hitting each other was part of the humor that they wanted to achieve, so they decided to leave it there, and they were right.

I’ll end all of this by saying, this is only my way of doing things. It’s perfectly reasonable if you discover a different way that works for you!

I always keep a bottle of Tequila handy under my desk.

#tips #gamedev #indiedev

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autoirishlitdiscourses · 3 years ago

Text

Discourse of Thursday, 07 October 2021

I say this is an emotional payoff and a lot of fun, though what you've outlined a series of topics under discussion quite uncommon, but the power company left me reading by the assignment write-up exam tomorrow: Girv 1004,9 a. The other students, followed by all of which parts of the century, insofar as it could theoretically have been, though, so this is a good idea in concept and/or Bloom's complex relationship to Celtic myth there are hundreds or thousands of races, and you asked some very perceptive reading of the three F's, but you handled yourself and your sense of the group warmed up and either satisfies or frustrates the expectation for the recitation errors, but will be closed on Monday.

By changing technology? Hi! I'll see you tomorrow! 649, p. On yourself though it was more lecture-oriented than it needed to—but looking at the end of the historical connections. Etc. I am happy to discuss and haven't quite punched through to an agreement at that time feels like it passes differently when you're doing the earliest part of the implications of the class develop its own: I think the fairest grade to you, but you'll be reciting, please email me the page number and my hands are not prepared, and so do I. You picked a longer paper in a paper/—even if you're treating the text s with which you engage in discussion, actually. I'm expecting it's a bit closer to the larger-scale discussions in relation to them a few ways in which language and thought in this task of analytical questions, OK?

You too! Section tonight like you were, at 7 p. You must declare in advance with the same time, I think that you are again; and so this is not to avoid them entirely, etc. You will note from my grading rubric some language might change a student's focus rather than the fact that the definition for all that it currently is. I say this not just two points are in fact up this week, and to think about those parts that build to your potential this time. I now I? Helpful for interpreting monetary amounts in Ulysses, and I will try to jam in extra points for discussion to occur. Lesson Plan for Week 7: General Thoughts and Notes 20 November Boy song on p. You effectively leveraged the group's discussion over the quarter. If you want to go about proving your points because it assumes it will drag you down a little more. There are a few things that they will be away from home, possibly as a British colony, Ireland used the same time, it allows you to give you feedback before, you should definitely be there on time. Mentioned in lecture tomorrow. Again, thank you for doing a good selection, effectively treated it as a way that shows you paid close attention to your section takes a stand as Heidegger has it explicitly on why your juxtaposition actually matters. You apply the late penalty, actually. Thanks for the quarter is over tomorrow, 1:30 tomorrow, you're very welcome. If your point total, based on the IDs they attempt, and this is what is your central claim in a comparable phenomenon, and didn't get the ball rolling in the early twentieth-century, whether the Jewish population has any similarities to yours. You should treat each other effectively while in the earlier recitation, and it showed.

There are many other possibilities, you related your discussion, and specifically with the assumption that you noticed that I really did quite a good weekend and may be ignoring the context of the quarter. Poke around and see what he thought just so that its purpose should be on the MLA format and where it is that the useless incompetent morons who pass as campus technicians decided to outsource our campus email to earlier this year.

Again, thank you both doing this. First: make sure you carefully evaluate whose viewpoint we're getting in Nausicaa and The Cook, the notes my students emails constantly, but you are adaptable to the poem takes on gender. Doing this effectively if the exam is scheduled. You did a very small but very well be phrased vaguely at the appropriate number of things that you can ameliorate anxiety-producing situations related to the real payoff for your health allows it, and this is a mark of sophisticated writing and studying so that it would be most closely associated. However, they're fair game for the recitation half of the first time, whereas The Butcher Boy both are a number of first-serve basis. Section this quarter. But, again, and how you see in order to pass beyond merely reciting twelve lines of Yeats's September 1913, which involves speculations about the recitation into a complex and insightful discussion. I'll see you tomorrow night get me a copy of your material effectively and in a genuinely excellent job! Let me know as soon as you should then discuss the general introduction to things that interest you to leave it. I'm mean but in your reading of it; again, it was my choice, depending on what you're actually claiming about the actual purpose of the following table: If you are scheduled or not, however.

Is it helpful to make huge conceptual leaps immediately, but against my other section for Thanksgiving. You were clearly a bit of a letter explaining specific reasons/why your grade and that this would be the same way that helps you prioritize. In exchange, I didn't anticipate at the coin from the course to pull their grades up for discussion. Wikipedia article on poitín for more sections like these on the section website, if you remind me to do with the rest of the forbidden, and you accomplished a lot of ways, was written. I am myself less than absolutely perfectly optimal. The short version is that you're capable of doing even better quality, and mechanics may also find it productive. 4% in the first half of your specific claim about how you want to recite and discuss can be a bit abstract, all in all, you can point to start writing. You picked a good weekend I'll see you next week in section.

I'm perfectly convinced that you're thinking about how your attendance/participation grade up substantially. I'll count your paper grade are the only student who sent a panicked email after sleeping into the A range; you might have helped you to refine your ideas more collaboratively.

Let me know what works for you but that you're reading. Have a good night, and you connected it effectively to the MLA standard and has no effect one way to impose limits on yourself though it does give you a copy to me immediately afterwards to make in the depth that you have done some very, very good student this quarter! Plan for Week 10: General Thoughts and Notes 16 October 2013 There are many possibilities; but a good holiday break! You're smart and I have that are not intellectually or temperamentally suited to being perceptive. I'll see you next week! I set the bar for A papers very high B. I thought I'd report it to introduce some major aspect of the professor's English 150 this quarter, this means, and the median grade was 88. Really, you may want to say that, with answers and notes on any replies that say, but you handled yourself and your sense of the total quarter grade at least somewhat. So a how this is not just of choosing your major points into questions and comments in section prepared to defend it; you also gave an engaged, thoughtful performance that is appropriate and helpful. You responded effectively to larger concerns of the possible points of the passage and showed this in some particulars from Chris's, and what you want any changes made I will not necessarily that you'll want to go for answers on questions about plagiarism should be cognizant of what you want to put it another way of being is the only thing preventing you from doing so. Keep an eye on the midterm or write to the rest of the pages in question generally or always plays by the way this is within the novel, and the musician. I agree wholeheartedly that Early Irish authors contains poems that will facilitate discussion. There are a lot that they each see themselves as being the plus and minus for each text that you would hope yes/no questions because often those just elicit yes or no and close off further discussion. You also demonstrated that he did it because he'd been focusing on an English Paper lots of good plays: thanks to! I think you have any questions arise sufficiently far in this essay: examined some large-scale course concerns and did a solid delivery of a third of a chance to have asked people to talk about the very first paragraph in the hope that you're working, which is a good student again have a middle A-is possible to accomplish this before the third-to-memorize twelve-line poem, and how they pay off for you and I completely appreciate that this was explained both verbally and in a final grade is calculated and I hope that everything else that you have a standard list of works cited page, and then looking through as I can be hard to be more impassioned which may differ in some ways in which he or she is paying for their recitation/discussion 5 p. He would most need to interrogate your own original work; any non-edited draft, letting it sit and then making sure that you need to represent them even further, though, your projected paper looks like it's going to be sure you know you've done a very strong paper. Hi! Truthfully, I can identify it. —But if that's inconvenient for you in section. It's just that your introduction: what are Joyce's attitudes toward sexuality in general, but all in all, you should definitely both be there. To get at least take a closer look at Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the class was welcoming and supportive to other people in, so there's plenty of material. McCabe TBD, Godot Vladimir's speech, so let me know if you don't have an appointment downtown that's going to be a tricky business, and that this is absolutely not necessary, but some students may not have a copy of the Artist As a Young Man, which is not a bad thing, and I wish someone had said to me.

Grading rubric for analytical papers like this and have a good path here what most needs to do quite a good job, and I may be that sitting down and start writing to figure out what that third plan looks like you were on track throughout your time and do not overlap with yours, and gave an excellent delivery, very good readings here. However: think about how to prompt people to speak can be particularly difficult to memorize because of a letter grade. Section Guidelines handout.

Please forgive me if you have any more questions, and that is related to gender. Engaging in close readings of V for Vendetta and Punishment and whichever other text s with which you should be careful to stay above the minimum length if the section, or Muldoon, just what I want a recording of your material very effectively and provided a good sense of the rhythm of Bloom's thoughts. He is also a good job of walking a rather uncomfortable scene with Father Sullivan is the origin of the quality the paper in on Wednesday! I'm looking forward to it, Audrey Niffenegger's novel The Time Traveler's Wife is perhaps most useful here, although it's not necessary, then this will count as a.

You've got some breathing room on other tasks that you occasionally seem to have been thinking about what possibilities for discussion by the burden of proof and the group seems to be expressed in your section who has explicitly brought up some important issues and/or language that intimidate or negatively impact your paper. Anyway, my point is that you yourself have done a good writer, not a play about the relationship between the poem.

I was now a dual citizen.

Keep your eye more clearly, but if you have left, but it's often helpful to log into the UCSB Library Proxy Server/before/clicking on the section, which after all, I think, too. It'll just need to be as effective as it could conceivably have been possible to accomplish, intellectually speaking, but leaves it as a whole. I'm leaning toward putting you either cross them or you can carry yourself, rather than merely plausible, which largely duplicates ID #1 from the original text. Great! 3%. E-mail off to be reciting Patrick Kavanagh Patrick Kavanagh, I think it happens. You are absolutely fine I think, to get you started thinking about how your paper is late reduces your score was 80% I'll have her talk to you after I broke my arm two years ago that might make you feel that your thoughts are being violated? That is, your writing is quite a long way,/not/that week and prepared to discuss with another person, dropped off in the context of the right expression of your total score for base grade-days late 10 _3-length penalty of/The Music Box/1932: There will be honest. The overall goal is to think about my own editing process.

Anyway, I think that your choice from Casualty could productively appear either near the beginning of the passage you'll be master here? Crashing? Jack Clitheroe, Jack Clitheroe, Jack Clitheroe, Jack Clitheroe, The walks by the section website: Pre-1971 British and Irish literature.

We Lost: Eavan Boland, What We Lost Eavan Boland, What We Lost: Eavan Boland, What We Lost Paul Muldoon, just over 87% in the/exact text of the quarter, I offer you a bit rushed and ran a bit less and allow for a job well done. Let me know if you really do have to say that it should be adaptable in terms of figuring out when to use the first section, you did quite an honor to win—people who see the cause that Irish culture should probably at least 46. 52: A traditional form of love, since you haven't yet decided what order I'll call people in the class develop its own: I think that there are a number of people aren't prepared, enthusiastic, informed, and on the midterm exam have been a good selection, in a long time, though as I normally try to get warmed up and talking about, I supposed I'd have to put everything you know what works for you two after another group for several days, and you should have read the entire review session. As it stands, I would suggest and this is an awfully slow recitation. Helpful for interpreting monetary amounts in Ulysses and other works, I think that one of the poems that's listed on the midterm or final I'm assuming that you're well prepared. I'm not trying to get back to your major one or two specific parts of Europe that frequently marks property lines, each will have failed to satisfy breadth requirements that you attend section Thanksgiving week instead of the quarter have been asking for it to know this about your topic to another student who's not able to find one here.

Hi! I will Yes.

All of the poem.

All in all, you should include a URL for sources that disagree with you, nor 93% the high end of the prospectus when I've given you should be careful about with this by Sunday night, and that not doing so. If I recall my ancient reading of the analysis fits into that arc. You've also picked a good choice to me by email by 12 November. We mustn't be led away by words, you've done a lot of ways in which this could conceivably have paid off for you. I; The photographing of ravens; all the presentations graded by Monday night. Can you schedule me a copy of your recording have no one else does feeling. It turns out, I think including at least. Just let me know if you are one of three people reciting from McCabe this week, you have a few more lines, but do feel free to skip to the section as a lens to look for cues that tell me more specifically: as it is, again, I will be paying attention to the class, and you've done some very interesting and sophisticated and that missing more than five sections and you display an excellent and opened up more points than you might, of course, Anglo-Irish, or hospitalization of a question or two key issues. You picked a very solid aspects of the room to go back over your own expression—and to push yourself to dig into some obscure yet well-chosen pieces of evidence that best supports your central argument? I'll see you next week. We feel in England, was written too close to ten sections this quarter, so I'm signaling that if you have already picked a longer selection than the assignment write-up test the next paragraph when you want your reader, and might be to make progress toward graduation that satisfies you and to use this as being entitled to demand from the dangers inherent in being exposed to the class's actual level of. Again, thank you for doing such a good understanding of the beautiful little gems throughout the quarter that is a mother: that you had an excellent sense of the quarter, and I genuinely hope that they will be by the time of the logical chain you're constructing. One of the novel, then you can start with the dates that would have gotten this to be time management you've only got ten to fifteen minutes. But this is what your grade: You may also find it helpful to take the midterm! I loved; changed nearly to almost in I nearly said; changed answered to said on my shelf at home, possibly due to strep throat, so that I can help you to help you to examine your various sources into a complex and insightful discussion. Do you need any advice, so I think that your own reading of a conversation with him, give him an F on the rest of the quarter. Your discussion and question provoked close readings of paintings if you get no section credit. You did a very good paper in other ways to do this a great job! Let me know if you want to go; it's of more benefit to the course edition of Opened Ground.

#Irish literature #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Python #Markov chains

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willwritesablog · 4 years ago

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Pillars of Eternity - Definitive Edition: Impressions, Criticisms and Review

Published by Obsidian Entertainment. Original release date: March 26th, 2015. Definitive Edition release date: November 15th, 2015.

Price: $29.99 MSRP. Current Steam Sale: $7.49. Current Epic Games Sale: $9.99 (with coupon.)

This article has also been published on Blogger.com (Mirror Link)

12/23/20

Over the past week or so, as a part of the Epic Games Free Game of the Week promotion, I’ve picked up Pillars of Eternity - Definitive Edition for free and have been playing it on its Normal difficulty almost nonstop ever since. This being the second video game by Obsidian I have played (the first one being Outer Worlds--releasing four years after Pillars had its original release), I felt it appropriate to share some of my thoughts over the quality and experience of this game, comparisons I have made, and some other miscellaneous observations. It’s worth prefacing this with that I have not fully completed a run through this game and haven’t actually completed the game’s second act as of yet (more on this later)--however, I’ve put close to 70 hours into this, and while others have spent thousands of hours on this video game I feel I can write on this with some authority.

Starting with its strengths, Pillars of Eternity is engaging. There is a lot of content to delve into. Much of its characterization is convincing, and the voice acting that it does have is well-performed. Another YouTube channel that I watch, “Should You Play It,” estimated in their review that “25%-30% of the game is voiced,” which seems like an accurate assessment to me. Regarding its story writing, its overall plot and characters themselves are very reminiscent of a decent or good Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Some tropes can be expected, but overall the plot runs smoothly enough, and the characters themselves are generally rather fun to interact with, even in cases where they're not very original.

The game does suffer from a variety of flaws, many of which aren’t immediately apparent to the player and that bear mentioning. The talent pool that Obsidian recruited to do their voices is incredibly small. Half of my party, as it turns out, was voiced by Matthew Mercer--possibly the most distinguished voice actor of the bunch--with my main character (using the “sinister” voice effects), the story character Aloth, and the story character Eder all being voiced by him. Kana, a character that comes later on, is voiced by Patrick Seitz (famous for many different television, video game and anime roles) and also does a character at the beginning of the game (Sparfel), the voice for the commander of the Crucible Knights, and multiple other additional voices. To my own ears, Richard Epcar had to be the most frequently-appearing voice actor in the game, voicing the Caravan Master at the beginning, Raedric’s voice, the spirit of Od Nua (whom I haven’t encountered yet) and the forge master Dunstan in Defiance Bay, along with other additional voices.

Sadly, Pillars of Eternity’s Credits page as well as the Full Cast and Crew IMDB Page only provide incomplete insight on who voiced which character within this game, and while some message boards exist on the subject I’ve not found a comprehensive resource over this topic (maybe I’ll attempt a full list for myself later on.) It’s a massive rabbit hole to go down nonetheless. The Outer Worlds handles this limitation as well, although that game’s execution of this I’d be inclined to say was a little more successful. Only 1% of Outer Worlds's entire production team were actually voice actors, which strikes me as interesting; the NoClip documentary series discusses details about this as well as how the writers had to plan questlines ahead of time to prevent characters with the same voice actor from interacting with each other, when possible. No definable moments of this happening in Outer Worlds come to mind off memory, although there were a couple of occurrences in Pillars (e.g. Kana and the Crucible Knight commander) where it wasn't avoided.

One of Pillars of Eternity’s major problems is interestingly a feature of its design--its Kickstarter rewards implementation. When you visit the first town, you are effectively bombarded with a number of uniquely-named NPC’s--and when you approach them, you get the opportunity to “look into their soul” or walk away. As a new player I was pretty befuddled by this, thinking that these were details I needed to memorize for some upcoming puzzle, when in actuality it wasn’t anything more than crowdsourced product-placement.

Some games can pull this off with success--LISA The Painful, for example, had a majority of its character names sponsored and selected by Kickstarter backers. As an RPG, this worked; you had a name on-screen detailing who it was that you were going to attack (on a black border above your characters), you kill them, and you move on. Other donor rewards involved creating a party member or a boss battle character, but these were done cautiously, and at least in my own experience, they didn’t hinder the game enough for me to discover that these were Kickstarter-donor characters on my own.

It’s the opposite case for Pillars. In many cases it’s special snowflake-ish. You’ll enter a bar and encounter 5 people named “commoner” and Archduke Franz “Quickfeet” Elfenhein, with a two-paragraph set of memories that mean frick-all to the actual experience. If you read all of these, you *might* encounter one or two funny ones, but what’s the point? You can expect that these were written before a finished product was released. It’s a dilapidated experience. Later in the game you’ll visit a house, with one of these pointless O.C.s effectively “standing guard” for no other purpose than to nick you town reputation points for trying to steal something.

Outer Worlds includes a stealing mechanic as well but it was implemented more fairly. Your character didn’t have to dump a bunch of points into a nearly-useless Stealth skill--instead, it was dictated by NPC line-of-sight. Stealing in Outer Worlds, for the most part, is actually *fun*, in Pillars, it was worth me avoiding entirely.

This may as well serve as a segway into the leveling system--on which I don’t have much to say about it, other than (maybe not relative to other ISO-RPGs, or in comparison to, say, Dungeon and Dragons) that it’s a headache. The story characters that the game gives you access to all have unoptimized and relatively-mediocre starting-stats, so to use all of them (exclusively, without hiring an unvoiced “mercenary” NPC) some creative planning is needed. You’ll also effectively want to min-max your own character’s build to help compensate for inevitable party weaknesses--the game (similar to Outer Worlds) offers a releveling system should you level up the wrong stats, but anything set at character creation is basically unchangeable--which is when the greatest number of character traits needs to be decided. Wizards are good, a priest or two is required (otherwise your party is without a healer), Chanters are bad--but you wouldn’t know this unless you looked it up ahead of time, or unless you’ve played the game before.

And this description leads me to my strongest point--Pillars of Eternity has a habit of setting up unclear rules, punishing players for breaking them, and calling that “replayability.” To be clear, if these “unclear rules” were drawn across moral lines then it wouldn’t be an issue. Fallout: New Vegas has a few main factions that the player could side with and give control of the main world to; all but maybe one of these choices could be argued as potentially being the “best outcome.” Pillars of Eternity (and Outer Worlds to a similar extent) is lacking in a lot of this--*and* game mechanic-wise, the game punishes you for doing normal, explorative stuff and so often sets up inconceivably unwinnable scenarios where you have to be so deliberate about your actions and game mechanic options to actually achieve a (clear-cut) best outcome. Outer Worlds is better with this.

A small example; in the beginning of Pillars, your character encounters some rioting townspeople accosting the owner of a grain mill. If you go inside, the mill owner notes that he is fair in his dealings, although he prioritizes the best of his grain stores to townspeople who need it the most (like pregnant women)--this quest being strikingly similar to one in Outer Worlds’s beginning. If you pass a resolve check of 14, the mill owner will allow for his grain stores to be seized by the rioters. Only if you pass a intelligence check of 12 does he actually lower the prices--and you can postpone solving this quest for an absurd amount of time, waiting until you have the right items and buffs to pass that speech check.

Another example; when exploring the docks at Defiance Bay, your character can notice a shining purple light. If he/she interacts with the light, your character will encounter the memories of a dead child. Should you trigger this innocuous interaction, you will have locked yourself out of being able to talk with townspeople on the disappearance of this boy, which includes the boy’s father, who has since become an alcoholic at the local bar. If you had spoken with the mother first, and then him, and passed a speech check, the man would go back home--otherwise, he’s stuck at the bar forever.

The worst example, *by far* of unfair, “gotcha!” game mechanics has to come from the quests within the game’s DLCs, The White March 1 and 2. Moderate spoilers ahead (warning to anyone concerned with those): you either have to outlaw the study of animancy, make certain dialog choices that lead to a companion becoming an evil crime boss, or lose out on a speech check at the end of DLC 2 when trying to teach mercy and compassion to a “god,” instead getting railroaded into one of two lesser outcomes, *OR* deliberately not finish the game’s second act, do all of the DLC stuff, and then come back if you want all three good endings.

Surely, however, it’s for “replayability.”

It’s punishing in the stupidest ways. Outer Worlds had a few negatives similar to this; you have two major factions that you can ally with, one being cartoonishly evil, and one quest exists where if you neglect to open up some unsuspecting dialog on a computer terminal (and instead delete it straight away) you permanently lock yourself out of a speech check and are then forced to genocide one (or both) of the other factions (or ignore it and get an even worse outcome.) Outer Worlds is metagameable in the sense that you can discover which decisions affect the ending slides ahead of time, and it encourages you to take advantage of its game mechanics a couple of times (particularly with how you can cheese an ending for a certain quest and with how you can cheese stealing a certain poster on Monarch that, by all accounts, an NPC should see you stealing) but certainly nothing to Pillars of Eternity’s scale--and it isn’t as demanding on the player’s time investment, either.

Another criticism--the amount of text present in both games fringes on ridiculous. To quote Philip J. Reed’s review on The Outer Worlds, “ Obsidian’s [writing] tends to be long, meandering, and packed with characters who will never use six words where a twelve-page monologue would suffice.” Pillars of Eternity is no exception to this claim; your character will frequently encounter lore books that most players will pick up and forget where they received them from (their placement usually being an inconvenience to immersion) and I as a player quickly had to learn to tune some things out--especially considering that I was already “metagaming”/looking up other quest analyses beforehand and had more-direct information about the characters on-hand.

A quirk in the dialog that’s consistent in both games is its style of integrating companions into your interactions; both games follow a formula of having an NPC talk to your character, followed up by a companion making some side remark that is hardly ever acknowledged by the NPC--as if your companion is whispering it to you (although the voice acting negates this), or as if it’s a theatrical aside, the companion characters doing a fourth-wall break to react to the events with you--and only you.

One aspect that Pillars of Eternity is stronger than Outer Worlds in, I would say, is in its combat scenarios. Early on in Pillars, the player is encouraged to storm a local leader (Lord Raedric)’s fort. The player has three options on doing this; climb up the side of the tower (using the grapling hook and some small skill checks) and fight through a small number of guards, go in through the main gates and fight most of the guards head-on, or sneak in through the sewer grates and fight monsters after using a strength check. Each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses, as this is early on enough that the loot you would acquire from fighting actually matters and each route can be fun in its own right.

Compare this with The Outer Worlds, where you have a similar fortress assault involving a sewer, a temporary disguise, or direct assault option, where the sewer entrance leads you straight to your objective, the combatants are innocent, non-soldier people (or robots), the disguise you would have falls off after every ten steps you take, and it’s late-game enough that attacking enemies won’t give you any worthwhile loot. Or compare it to the quest “The City and the Stars,” in which you can either stealth through a whole building, or kill the building’s guards and lose town reputation points... or pass a simple skill check where your character can acquire a permanent disguise and not set off any of the enemies whatsoever, allowing you free travel to loot and make it to your objective. Or again, compare it with the quest “Passage to Anywhere” where you as a player are either tricked into spending all of your money on opening up a shortcut, fighting and beating two overpowered enemies (which I did), or blitzing through an alternative route, outrunning all of the enemy characters and potentially bypassing a third of the game in the process (the easiest, by far, to do.)

Maybe these deficiencies are easier to see in hindsight, after a finished product exists, but these are negative aspects of game design.

The combat mechanics themselves are pretty fun. Sometimes the pathfinding glitches out (or A.I. will inhibit your characters from automatically attacking a new enemy), and the lack of a single button to change your entire party’s weapons is a small inconvenience, but for the most part it works well. The design choice of having this be a game where you repeatedly “pause” the game to issue new combat instructions (rather than feature a turn-based system) can be fatiguing over long play sessions, and Pillars being that style of game might be a dealbreaker to some players, but I generally enjoyed that feature.

A final point on the writing--Obsidian is a little “woke.” There’s really no getting around this one. I’d like to revisit the idea of certain (reasonable) dialog choices not being included in Obsidian’s games, either out of laziness (e.g., in Pillars of Eternity, my character, a priest of Berath, encountered a small chapel to Berath... and all of the dialog choices amounted to “Who is Berath,” “I’ve never heard that title of Berath’s be used before,” even though other dialog checks take your background into account) or from lack of playtesting and feedback (e.g. in Outer Worlds, not having the option to transport a certain character to a different planet on this early quest’s third outcome) but certain decisions and design choices by the studio don’t have that excuse.

In Pillars, for example, the only way to get a good outcome on one quest and thus significantly raise your reputation in the town, is to lower the price of black market birth control. No moral qualms are raised and no ways for your character to roleplay against this are made available. Prostitutes also exist in Pillars of Eternity (although that feature remains partially broken), and the only way to get a (stackable, temporary) +2 enhancement on your resolve is for your player to solicit a male prostitute in the game. Outer Worlds also features a major quest, where you’re expected to assist one of your companions in getting into a lesbian relationship; again, no way to repel or address any disagreements or differences through your player character’s roleplaying are present. The mentality is like the equivalent of the show Arthur’s episode on gay marriage; “if we don’t address or allow representation for our opposition, it doesn’t exist.” It’s ironically closed-minded and annoying when the game that frames the weight of your moral decisions is so detectably and consistently biased.

Minor spoiler alert, but both games also feature a priest support-character that (at some point in the game) hates their god, and the character leading the not-evil main faction in Outer Worlds was directly inspired by Rick from Rick & Morty--if that speaks anything as to the mentality of this studio. Other choices, such as (in Pillars) winning reputation points by buying and freeing slaves as opposed to killing the slaver and freeing slaves, and winning reputation points for forgiving someone of manslaughter and allowing the person to keep his secret, also speak a little on Obsidian’s morality and inhibit player freedom in additional annoying ways.

ALL that complaining aside... there is a lot to enjoy. It’s a big world to tap into, and it does have a sequel where you can import data from this game into that and have some of your major decisions be reflected in that game as well. It also features a stronghold (a Kickstarter stretch goal) that the player can manage--some meta knowledge of the game’s upcoming events and mechanics helps a lot in this, but it’s certainly a unique addition to this type of RPG and is genuinely a fun thing to work with. The combat mechanics are fun, although in many situations, it felt far easier to cheese the opponents’ pathing A.I. by luring a single enemy away, murdering him, and saving the game (note: both Pillars and Outer Worlds will likely leave you with a mess of save files after one playthrough), rinsing and repeating, and it would have been a welcomed feature had there been a button to change all party members’ weapons at once (which is helpful in that strategy, where you shoot a character, run away, and then beat on him/her/it as a group with swords) but the combat was still overall fun (albeit perhaps tiring and a monotonous after long hours of play.) The player economy is relatively punishing, with found items typically holding around an eighth of their sale value when you resell them, but this too is manageable (especially if you exploit a money glitch like the one from the first town.)

Obsidian can make a good game. It’s just disheartening to see that many of its flaws are systematic.

Ratings:

Pillars of Eternity - Definitive Edition: 7/10

The Outer Worlds: 8/10

Follow twitter.com/will_salsman for more content!

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peterorneholm · 5 years ago

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How the cloud got me a free Swedish massage

Ok, technically, it's my employer Active Solution that provides free Swedish Massage for me as an employee (according to The Daily Show is is part of our Stockholm Syndrome). The issue though, is that the weakly massage has limited amount of available seats. You can sign up in advance, but I never seem to prioritize that and when it’s Wednesday morning, all slots are usually taken.

Working a couple of years at this place I’ve realized a few things though: There will always be one or two persons that in the last minute needs to hand their slot over to someone else. The way we handle this is as simple as sending out an email to everyone stating:

“Available massage time at 11 o’clock!”

You reply and you get the slot. But I’m too late to the game, every - single - time.

I thought, how can I beat the game and always be first to grab those available slots? And this is where the cloud comes in :)

Introducing Massage Email Bot

To be able to grab those available slot I wanted to implement some kind of automatic reply on those specific emails. You can do conditional auto replies in Outlook, but those rules will only evaluate on the client which requires you to have your computer and Outlook running at all time. Didn’t work for this scenario.

As the developer I am I was thinking of writing some Azure Function, grabbing emails through the Microsoft Graph Outlook API:s and doing some magic there, but it all seemed to much orchestration for such simple task. I quickly evaluated Logic Apps (that could have solved it) but eventually turned to Microsoft Flow (which i, from what I can understand, is a more end user friendly version of the same infrastructure as Logic Apps). Microsoft Flow is at its core quite similar to IFTTT which I’m using for automating other things.

In Microsoft Flow I used the Office 365 Outlook Connector, listened for incoming emails, filter them out by the subject line and then make a customized auto reply. My first version looked like this:

But after trying it out I realized a few flaws, most importantly, it would introduce an infinite loop and completely flood my inbox. Because the auto reply also included “Massage time” in the subject line, the same flow would trigger on the auto reply and so it would go on forever. I also wanted to avoid any auto reply outside of the organisation, so I wanted to filter on our email domain.

Using the conditional block I made sure to only reply on the initial email and ended up with this flow.

I was ready to try it out, but realized it was to slow! It took up to several minutes for it to make the reply. Turned out that the free plan only runs the flow roughly every 15 minutes and I needed to step up to a Premium plan to get 1 minute checks. I would have loved if the Outlook connector could take advantage of the notification API and react immediately without having to scan the inbox in intervals. But you could get a 90 day free trial for Premium, so I did and now it was quick enough.

So, finally Wednesday and massage time. As usual I had no slot and was quite occupied so didn’t have time to check my inbox and then it happened. My bot had grabbed an available slot for me and my time paid off ;)

Ideas of improvement

Calendar integration: I did try to parse the time in the email and create a slot in my calendar (and also verified I was actually available), but people tend to write the time in so many ways it wasn’t easily solvable. I did try to run it through Cognitive Services Text Analysis but it only catches the most obvious cases which I as easily could grab with a simple Regexp, might be that the Swedish model is not as accurate as the English one.

Multi language: At Active Solution we speak multiple languages, so it would be nice if it supported multiple languages. Maybe overkill, but there is a translator connector that could provide a generic solution to that “problem”.

Summary

I’ve actually turned of this flow now, to give my colleagues a fair chance of grabbing those slots, but it was a fun way of exploring a new technique. I think Microsoft Flow can really automate boring and simple tasks while you can spend time on more interesting things. For some scenarios you’ll have to step up your pricing plan, but the free tier will handle most of your personal scenarios.

#azure #flow #logicapps #microsoft #massage

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ebizworldwide · 8 years ago

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12 Certain Ways To Ruin A Conference Call

Email might be the predominant type of communication in business, yet it's not the only medium. It's not used for the most important minutes. In person conferences or live phone telephone calls are needed for immediate problems or substantial planning issues. Live communication is personal as well as direct. No matter exactly how commonplace e-mail has ended up being, we still need to be people from time to time.

Conference calling will always be prominent due to the fact that, while more informal approaches like e-mail can obtain complicated, a lot more formal meetings are challenging logistically and otherwise inconvenient or invasive for many individuals. From servants to Chief executive officers, teleconference drive exchanges outside the firm. Anticipate to spend a fair amount of time, especially several of one of the most substantial minutes of your occupation, on the phone with others.

Representing your organization in a teleconference comes fantastic duty. It truly is no location for newbie mistakes. Below is a consideration of the 12 most specific means you can ruin that conference call.

Eating Over The Phone

It's not polite, or even though I might be eating a sandwich while typing this article, no person wishes to listen to a sandwich being eaten or a nasally voice talking over chewing. Past that, you certainly do not want 10 other individuals having that picture of you. Eat prior to the meeting or at the very least bring in something peaceful to consume or drink.

Making use of Dating Sites or Social Media

Some faux pas are so evident that they are obnoxious to also suggest, also noticeable to consider, but odd points happen all the time. There was at least one poll asserting 10 percent of people confessed to reading dating sites throughout seminar phone calls. Social media could be a substance addiction, yet tell your partner you will preferred her newest tweet after job and also usage social networks for significant updates regarding the market or the company.

Falling Asleep

Another seeming no-brainer, Wall Road Journal recognizes over 25 percent of people admit to having actually snoozed through a teleconference. Also Morgan Freeman was broken resting during a video clip seminar. Get a great night's sleep before visiting work.

Monitoring Email or Various other Divided Tasks

Most people do other job during teleconference, including inspecting email. There is always something showing up, something more to do. Writing a record throughout a call is refraining a favor to the customer or your organization. Multitasking is a vital workplace skill, however emphasis has to be prioritized to the customers as well as company matters at hand, then relocate on.

Using the Toilet

Hello? The 21st century is calling. Modern ease preponderates. We could get anything on a minute's notice and also aren't particularly excellent concerning keeping in mind how you can do things the old means. We made use of to take breaks to do things like eat, smoke, go to the bathroom, etc. Nowadays, we work regularly. Half of seminar customers bowel movement while on the phone. This isn't really even courteous to do with a buddy, do not let your income source hear your intestinal noises.

Inviting the Entire Company

While it is great practice to be comprehensive as well as transparent as a firm, it's not the very best practice to flood one area with people speaking over each other. Customers on the various other end require a natural evaluation from a knowledgeable representative. It is necessary to consist of issues from colleagues, but co-workers have better work tasks besides snoozing via conference calls.

Not Being Battle Ready

It's one thing to be behind in job. It's an additional point completely to not have products prepared to share with a person who scheduled time to hear you. They don't intend to hear that you are not rather sure whether you obtained that email or why you don't have the data that was requested. Make certain you have all your ducks straight before the call.

Unknowning How you can Utilize the Equipment

Despite technological technologies, pet dogs are still guy's buddy, technology is not. Problems, collisions as well as a myriad of scary tales, torment workplace tools. People comprehend things occur, however there's a restriction to perseverance. Save reasons of accidents for unusual events. Make certain you know just how to handle several lines and various other trickery of mobile phones or computer system programs before making the telephone call. Don't inadvertently lose the call when you implied to mute it for a 2nd to sneeze. Going down the ball at the wrong time can lose the game.

Having the Telephone call In a Loud Place

The arbitrary places for teleconference by the Wall Street Journal include a vehicle stop bathroom, a pool in Vegas, also a wardrobe at a friend's residence during an event. While it's mindful to devote some intimacy to a conference, being at a celebration to begin with was possibly a bad suggestion. Customers do not wish to hear some individual walking by with a boombox, however that doesn't imply an echoey shower stall is the location to obtain away from the sound. Locate something halfway professional.

Rambling On and On and On

Everyone despises meetings. Everyone. Short as well as to-the-point is a dish for success. Of program, don't reduce people short or neglect issues. Bring every little thing necessary to the table, not consisting of why your mother really did not such as the last seminar telephone call interrupting lunch plans and also a wide variety of various other unnecessary things that are an annoyance to individuals and also their busy job days.

Not Being Interesting

Some people are boring. Personally, I am as monotone as well as deadpan as they come, however it doesn't indicate I am a stick in the mud. Have some ice breakers, some amusing things to minimize stress. Try to reveal that you're a real person. If the customers wanted an automated feedback, they would certainly just send e-mail. Do not be so concentrated on the product you're offering that is becomes the only mission you care about. Clients get with their feelings, not their analytic minds. Make that somebody excited to purchase from you or function with you. That only happens if they assume you're personable.

Driving While Conferencing

Smartphone class reaches automobile stereos as well as other hands-free gadgets, making driving as well as chatting hassle-free. People will not be also dismayed if you arrange an eleventh hour conference during a drive to Denver, yet make these situations uncommon as well as do not make it too obvious that you're driving. Individuals obtain upset when others drive as well as use the phone, even individuals that drive and utilize the phone themselves. Crashes take place because people's minds are on other points. It is essential to maintain your mind on the roadway, so you make it to Denver. When possible, conserve the telephone call for a while that your client won't hear you squeal off the highway to your death.

A good variety of points from this list share a typical thread: don’t be distracted. If you have to, be distracted by scribbling or playing word online games associated to the conference. It takes a great deal of technique to maintain your head in the video game while also being distracted. And when you go to 20 phone calls weekly with a rotating cast of characters that drop in to parts of telephone calls, it'll get laborious as well as aggravating. Bad stuff will certainly occur. Corners will certainly be reduced. A smart person will let that occur to somebody else. When it returns to bite them, you will remain in line to win the contract.

#business #new business #social media

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ouraidengray4 · 8 years ago

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How Eating Dessert Can Actually Help You Lose Weight

Can I eat dessert on this plan?

The constant recurrence of this question has opened my eyes to an important reality: Building any fitness or nutrition plan around something that doesn’t feel sustainable will probably lead to failure. This is why I’ve adjusted my stance on dessert in the last few years, and my clients' results have never been better.

In fact, if I had a time machine, the first thing I’d do is rewrite the forewords of all the books I’ve published and make something very clear: No matter what you read in these pages, you can still have dessert.

The no-dessert approach could be the one mistake that is most consistent, no matter what plan you’re following for fitness and nutrition. You see, thinking certain foods are off-limits is a big reason why you might have a difficult relationship with food. It’s time to break that dangerous mindset.

Let Yourself Eat Cake!

The no-dessert mentality reflects the popular belief that there are "good foods" and "bad foods." Put more simply, most people believe that some foods will make you fat, while others are fair game to indulge in. This simply isn’t true. While some foods do have more calories, fat, or carbs, how you eat these foods is what makes all the difference. Fat isn’t bad, and neither are carbs. Restricting yourself to super-low calories isn’t healthy either.

Those who ate dessert lost an additional 15 pounds, while those without dessert gained 15 pounds. Sound familiar?

Your focus should be on having a basic understanding of the human body, so you can bend the rules to make them work for your body. This is the big picture that everyone seems to ignore: Your body is different from the bodies of your friends, coworkers, family members, and that celeb on the magazine cover. Ignoring this reality and doing what they do might work, but if it isn't a good fit for you, it's inevitably going to fail.

Let's take the Paleo diet as an example. While I have no problem with the Paleo diet in theory, people can approach a healthy diet in an unhealthy way. There are two main problems with this diet plan:

If you love pasta and bread, the Paleo diet probably won’t work for you. Sure, it might technically work for a short period, but you’ll eventually miss those foods, go back to them, and end up following a hybrid version of the plan that won’t deliver results. Should you be eating more fruits and vegetables? Of course. Does that have to come at the expense of chocolate-cherry fudge cake? No, and scientific evidence supports the eat-dessert approach. More on that in a minute.

Diets like Paleo propose the magic-bullet theory. This rationalizes a right to eat as much as you want of certain foods because they're "healthy." While the foods might be good for your body, if you eat too much of anything, you will gain weight. A healthy diet is not the same as a diet that helps you lose weight.

Let that sink in for a moment, as it’s something that almost everyone—including me early in my career— struggles to comprehend. Healthy foods, while good for you, still have their limits and can still make you fat.

Stop Asking, "Is This a Good Food?"

Eat all the organic, grass-fed, no-antibiotic foods in the world, and you’ll still gain weight. Stuff yourself with gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free foods, and you can still pack on the pounds.

Are these foods "bad" for you, per se? Of course not. But that’s not the issue. No one food will make you fat, and no one food will make you thin. So stop asking, "Is this a good food?" You create a terrible relationship with food when you think you have to completely avoid what you love. This instills a mindset of restriction, which leads to frustration, which leads to a lack of consistency, which leads to… well, you know the drill: You end up hating any diet, give nutrition the middle finger, go to town on everything in your pantry, and feel even worse about yourself.